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.