Building an interoperability framework

breaks everyone in and uncovers the weak spots in your governance process.

As a rule of thumb, work on policies that will make the biggest difference first. Almost every significant SOA project, for example, chokes on authentication and authorization issues at one point or another. Without a coherent policy, each project will go its own way and the result will be incompatibility and costly retooling later on.

Registries are another area where policies can make a difference early on. Plan out your registry strategy and then make sure that you have policies in place to support it.

Enterprise and system-level reference architectures show developers, architects, and project managers the preferred way to do everything from building hooks in their code for WSM (Web service management) tools to preferred hardware deployments for high-availability applications.