Why SOA?

The increasing pressure to rapidly develop innovative services and products characterizes the competitive environment for enterprises at the beginning of the 21. century. Based on a survey of the “Economist Intelligence Unit” (eiu.com) the top challenges for managers are:

1. Rapid adoption of change (71%)
2. Speed of innovation (58%)
3. Client acquisition / loyalty (47%)
4. Cost control (44%)

IT should support each of these challenges strategically and operationally. In order to live up to this expectation an integrated IT-architecture is required which unifies processes, employees and information, without eroding flexibility and productivity. A Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) offers such an all-embracing view on business process alignments and allows for a seamless integration of innovative and existing technologies.

How does SOA work?

The SOA concept is based on the provision of functional different “services”. The specific functionality of each service can be addressed via its standardized interface. Thus the process logic is not embedded in one monolithic software program but shared between many modular services. This flexibility allows to react to changing business environments immediately. Simplified this can be compared to building blocks, which allow via adding or restructuring of single elements to create many different systems.

The 3-Layer model

Three layers are differentiated:

•  User-Interfaces
•  Processes (Workflows)
•  Data Services

Governance and security guidelines form the basis below each layer.

Data services form the first layer and offer individual functions to calling processes via their standardized interfaces. A connection to existing database- and legacy-systems can also be realized via specialized data services.

At the process level different business processes form the connector between the user interface and the data services. Core advantage of the SOA concept is that the processes are not hard-wired with specific user-interfaces or program modules, but can be modeled completely detached from the other layers (e.g. via graphical workflow-design / BPM-Tools).

At the top layer the users interact with dedicated workflows via different GUI (Graphical User Interface) concepts. For instance these could be web-based, application integrated (e.g. MS Outlook), mobile device enabled or traditionally form-based.

The differentiation of the three layers thus allows for a sustainable structuring of the application environment while ensuring maximum flexibility and connectivity.
 
SOA summarized: goals, advantages and challenges

• A Service Oriented Architecture embraces goals for  business process orientation, innovativeness and modular design
• By employing a SOA concept heterogeneously grown IT environments can be efficiently adopted to rapid changing business environments
• Required new functionality can be added modularly, or existing services can be reemployed for other processes which significantly reduces redundancies
• The resulting cost savings allow for a “step-by-step” restructuring of even very complex application systems
• The path to a complete SOA migration is challenging. Smaller goals should be targeted first however it is always important to keep “the big picture” in mind

SOA- Welcome to the next evolutionary step in IT.