The core notion is that SOA is a complex problem, but when broken down to its component parts, and examined in logical steps, a successful outcome highly likely. ZapMentorship consists of a bundling of the following offerings aimed at various parts of the SOA lifecycle.

ZapValue: Business Case, ROI, and Assessment Validation.
Goal: Ensuring a Feasible Business Return for SOA within the Context of your Capabilities
In this offering, ZapValue attempts to help client verify the established or proposed business case against industry benchmarks, verify whether the proposed ROI is feasible or in the correct scope.Deliverables from this Engagement include:

• Evaluation of established SOA Business case
• Evaluation of ROI methods and metrics
• Analysis of current costs for IT delivery, and assessment of inflexible, nondiscretionary budgetary spend on non-SOA implementations with possibility of cost recovery
• Analysis of current organizational and architectural capabilities that would provide for future flexibility
• Analysis of potential redundancy and reuse capabilities for increase in sharing
• Analysis of current level of maturity of respondents as compared with industry benchmarks and overall maturity guidelines.
• Analysis of current compliance, governance expenditures and risk tolerance
• Analysis of projected size for SOA delivery and scope of SOA projects
• Analysis of current infrastructure spend and potential SOA-specific infrastructure expenditures (ESB, management, process, policy, security, and governance)
• Analysis of industry market and comparisons to industry benchmarks

ZapAssurance: Implementation Assurance and SOA Benchmarking.
Goal: SOA Measurement and benchmarking
Having a plan and executing against a plan for implementing SOA is certainly a good starting point, but is not enough to ensure overall SOA success. Making progress on a SOA roadmap requires that firms measure progress against existing goals, best practices, and third-party organizations. ZapAssurance is a set of SOA measurement and analysis services that help to provide continuous assessment of ongoing SOA activities and provide a benchmark for validating success of SOA benchmarked against best practices.The following aspects of SOA will be measured and benchmarked:

• Analysis and development of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) on the effectiveness and business relevance of process, methods, approaches, and procedures employed to define, design, build, and implement SOA.
• Analysis and development of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) on the effectiveness of the activities around development of the core service-level understanding of the problem domain and core process-level understanding of the problem domain.
• Analysis and development of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) on the effectiveness of the activities around service design and development.
• Analysis of the activities around development of the core SOA Governance model.
• Analysis and development of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) on the effectiveness of the activities around technology selection and validation.
• Analysis and development of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) on the effectiveness of Service runtime infrastructure

ZapValidation: Methodology and Operational.
Goal: Checking a Company's SOA Architectural efforts against established practices, standards, and methodologies
ZapThink will evaluate Client's methodologies considering both documented architectural and supporting artifacts as well as by conducting interviews and interaction with Client.

The artifacts and range of activities to be considered include:

• Service analysis and design approaches and methodologies
• business process composition and decomposition approaches
• architecture team structuring and organizational approaches
• Service domain models and logical Service structures
• SOA infrastructural plans and design considerations
• Governance frameworks across range of design-time, run-time, and change-time activities
• Service implementation and interface design and methodologies
• Metadata management approaches, data modeling and schema design
• SOA funding models and ROI assessment approaches
• adoption of architectural standards and practices
• adoption of technology-specific (including Web Services) standards and practices
• technology vendor dependence.

ZapMethods: Service Model, Architectural Artifact, and Governance Framework Mentorship.
Goal: Best Practices guidance on architectural output
ZapThink will provide a Master Architect who will work directly with Client's architects or implementation team to generate essential architecture artifacts based on emerging best practices, standards, and methodologies.

Such artifacts may include:

• Service Models and Domain Models - A methodology for Defining Services (Service Templates) as well the Services in production as well as requirements for new or changed Services, grouped into Service domains, which identify the shared business context of such Services.
• Governance Framework -- identifies those corporate policies that are within scope of SOA initiative, and delineates all salient characteristics of those policies.
• Service Composition and Service-oriented Process- describes those business processes that are within scope of SOA initiative and decomposes them into recommended Services.
• Service contract template - details both functional and nonfunctional characteristics that all Services must have.
• SOA artifact schedule - lists the various metadata artifacts that are relevant to Client's SOA implementation, and delineates the lifecycle and application of those artifacts.
• Evaluation of existing SOA Assessments - Including Organizational, Architectural, Infrastructural, Governance, and Skills Assessments.
• Evaluation of client's SOA Roadmap that provides timing and guidance on implementation of specific aspects of SOA roll-out.