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The significance of service-oriented architecture (SOA) is that it offers a real opportunity to take IT to a new level as a true business enabler. It compels enterprise architects to understand the impact of the business model first, and then to evaluate how to enhance the IT portfolio.
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In other words, SOA requires enterprise architects to focus on business capabilities rather than on applications. To do this, the business processes must be expressed in terms of the capabilities they require. These capabilities then need to be evaluated for commonalities and synergies before mapping them to the enabling systems. SOA thus has the effect of requiring that IT systems form part of the overall business or enterprise architecture.
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Taking a closer look
Three important factors are driving enterprise architects to take a positive interest in SOA as they work towards high performance:- Organizations can become truly agile: Traditional IT thinking, which typically created an application for each new business process, cannot create the organizational agility required in today's competitive market. In contrast, SOA's perspective is not application-centric, but capability centric, seeing things from the point of view of the architecture of the entire enterprise.
- IT can be mass customized: This is a concept borrowed from manufacturing, where different combinations of standard modules can create an individualized product within a mass production framework. Using SOA, the same principle can be applied to IT, and thus the business processes that IT enables.
- Legacy IT investments can be protected: By creating a flexible layer that can be reconfigured according to business needs, SOA effectively reuses legacy IT in new ways.
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So, what now?
To successfully implement SOA, as organizations work towards achieving high performance, four main issues need to be attended to:- Enhance the application portfolio: SOA builds on what already exists, so it is necessary to define the existing systems landscape, and what services its various elements provide.
- Establish and empower enterprise architecture governance: Organizations run on information, so it is vital to help confirm the quality of information architectures. Proper architectural planning, and an effective governance structure for the enterprise architecture as a whole, is therefore essential.
- Promote ever closer alignment between business and IT: Getting the IT department and business units to work together effectively has always been a challenge, but it is an imperative if SOA is to be effective.
- Apply SOA thinking to the business itself: As the business becomes more closely aligned with the supporting IT, SOA thinking must be applied to both technology and business processes.
SOA is attracting great interest because it offers a way to reconceptualize existing business and IT systems as part of an organization's overall enterprise architecture. The aim is to create the agility that organizations need to achieve high performance in today's customer-focused, competitive marketplace.
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