Leveraging Federal IT Investment—Using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA): An Analysis of SOA's Value Proposition for Federal Senior Leadership Teams
This white paper is part of a series of documents and presentations created to provide a broad overview of
service oriented architectures (SOA) and considerations regarding their applicability and successful
implementation.
SOA has become a high-interest paradigm for developing Federal large-scale, networked, agile systems
of systems. However, SOA and the underlying Web Service implementation standards present new IT
planning and portfolio management challenges for senior decision makers. Special considerations arise
when employing SOA in the Federal IT domain space. We are faced with an enterprise larger than any
commercial enterprise as well as a diversity of constraints that are unique to the Federal domain. These
include acquisition and funding models, legislation, and unique cultural barriers.
The breadth and depth of efforts to address these challenges across the commercial, academic, and
government domains are significant. MITRE is actively working with all three sectors to provide the best
advice to our customers. However, the urgency to address these challenges with so many competing
perspectives and interests—including financial—has led to an overload of information and commercial
products in the Federal domain. Some of the information and vendor advice is helpful; sometimes it's
not.
