SOA Success Plus Wiki

SOA, What is it?

SOA stands for Service Oriented Architecture - It is the current paradigm for modern development that leverages technology enhanced through the advent and continued growth of the Internet.

Rather than creating a fixed application that requires continuous costly change to adapt to new business processes, SOA provides a "catalog of capabilities" that can be assembled by the business.

This approach has the potential to dramatically reduce ongoing expenditure in IT; whilst providing more rapid flexibility in assembling processes to meet changing business needs or for new business models.

Why should we adopt SOA?

Adoption of SOA is occurring in business today - it is a natural progression.

It reduces cost whilst providing more business flexibility.

There is a continuous need to provide more capabilities with lower costs - SOA if implemented successfully will achieve this goal on an ongoing basis and provide improved business agility.

Today's developers can not continue to improve productivity using paradigms developed from the 1990s and 1980s. The inherent complexity and the fixed business processes surrouding the systems are inhibiting.

How do we protect our existing investment in Information Technology?

In the past, a new paradigm shift has meant costly IT investment to replace existing IT systems utilising either a COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf)/MOTS (Modified Off The Shelf) or custom build approach, each requiring significant investment in terms of time and money without necessarily improving productivity.

This is not the case with SOA!

No need to rip and replace - the current and next generation of commercial software, from the major suppliers, are providing capabilities that can be used in a SOA environment.

Still realising original investment - most modern custom build applications have the capability, but may require some refactoring.

High recurring maintenance costs and too costly to redevelop - Sounds like a legacy application that has significant value to the organisation! These applications need to be migrated in a fashion that automates the majority of "eyeball" type work. Thus ensuring that the inherent capabilites can become a part of the "catalog of capabilities" available to business users.

How do we implement SOA?

There are a number of starting points that have varying impact to business value. IBM have defined 4 levels of SOA Adoption:

Level 1 - Implementation of Individual Web Services
Level 2 - Service Oriented Integration of Business Functions
Level 3 - Enterprise Wide IT Transformation
Level 4 - On Demand Business Transformation

Once the type of implementation is chosen - understanding your business process and establishment of governance are also critical for achieving success.

Understanding the business processes ensures that in an implemented SOA environment, that workflow can be tweaked and optimised by a business analyst. This will require strong governance and coordination to achieve. From an IT perspective, Architectural Governance will be a high priority.

For all involved, there will be change and a need to adopt new methods!

Interesting starting points:

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