SOA Minimal Architecture

I know that very less people have heard about SOA Minimal Architecture term,but this is the architecture which is the beginning stage of creating SOA architecture for any business model. In reality,it takes some time to complete the SOA reference architecture (if architecture is ever really finished).

It is not important to have everything before you start or to have complete models,documentations,standards,and governance in place before allowing the first service to be designed and built. But, it is better or important to have an idea of what you are doing.

It is important to have a high-level vision of the architecture in terms of the service hierarchy,service inventory,and semantic information model,before you create very many services.

I would recommend to create SOA minimum architecture. This is the minimum architecture that determines the few things that absolutely must be standardized in order to meet the enterprise goals and clearly specifies them.

Then,it helps to put an architectural vision in place for how the rest of the architecture might be defined,and a process for continual,incremental enhancement and improvement of the architecture.

For enterprise SOA,those crucial things are the service definitions,service inventory,and semantic information model.

The minimum architecture should contain:-
What kind of service is — Types and granularities of services. For example, business, domain, utility, integration external,and foundation services.

Required interfaces and functions — Interfaces or other functions that services are required to use or support. For example, all services must support the management interface and use the logging service.

Technical infrastructure — What technology services use to communicate.For example, Web Services conforming to the WS-I Basic Profile v1.1 and Security Profile v1.0.

High-level semantic information model — Identify the major enterprise business entities and documents required. What information do they need in common to meet enterprise goals? What information needs to be shared between services? For example, a consolidated customer entity supports the business goal of having a single customer view.

Initial service inventory — Identify the major service groups and services needed to support enterprise goals and processes. Determine an organizational structure (such as line-of-business or functional domain).Integrate appropriate industry standards or patterns.

High-level business model— Identify the major enterprise business processes and the common processes that occur across enterprise domains. Identify the underlying capabilities needed to support those processes.

Service identification, specification, and design process — This describes how the architecture and enterprise context fit into and support the development process.

Architecture life cycle process — A feedback mechanism for the constant updating and enhancement of the architecture.

Roadmap — The roadmap addresses at least two areas. The first is a rough priority order of service implementation based on dependencies,commonality, and usefulness. This doesn't specify a timeline, nor take into account other business drivers, but it provides an initial vision for building out the service inventory. The second is a high-level plan for building out the architecture.

In my opinion the minimum architecture should take between 4 and 8 weeks to produce,depending on the size and complexity of the enterprise,and the experience,capability and number of architects.