Service oriented architecture (SOA) is a framework that has evolved from the distributed computing model to improve the agility, quality, productivity, and cost effectiveness of a business through the implementation of “services”, which act as the primary method of providing logic and data to support a specific business capability.
There are many different definitions of service oriented architecture, which complicate its landscape but these fundamental concepts can be found in most implementations:
- Services must be reusable
- Services must be loosely coupled whenever possible
- Service logic and data must be “contained” and distributable
- Services must be stateless whenever possible
- Services must be “discoverable”
- Services must be technology independent
Businesses that have established a solid integration infrastructure and identified opportunities for the standardization and reuse of business capabilities are candidates for SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). The SOA framework provides a modeling structure that can be used to organize and share business capabilities within - and outside - their organization. This ability to share and utilize capabilities outside of one’s own business domain becomes a very enticing aspect of SOA. The SOA framework also provides the ability to combine capabilities in order to satisfy multiple business needs.
For example, a business may have a capability - such as placing orders, which is used by their customers, sales reps, vendors, and customer services personnel. This capability is contained within a service consisting of the business logic and data necessary to perform the actions needed to place the order.
Other capabilities may be more simplistic such as requesting a purchase order number or a return merchandise authorization number. These capabilities can be combined with other capabilities to form more complex services – creating an architectural framework that provides a means to match a user’s specific business need using a catalog of available capabilities – no matter how small or complex the capability may be.
This cataloging and reuse of business services provides a wealth of benefits including:
- An increase in customer satisfaction - through the ability to reuse a common set of business services, which allows for quicker customer utilization.
- An increase in business agility – A service oriented architecture provides the ability to capitalize on market opportunities more quickly, which increases revenues and reduces business risks.
- A decrease in IT development costs - reusing services provides a means for the business to deploy applications more quickly and facilitate better business decisions through automated data consolidation.
- A decrease in business operating costs – implementing an SOA provides an easy-to-use integration infrastructure that reduces the efforts of both customer and supplier. It also provides a means to make use of internal resources in the most efficient way. An SOA can improve financial reporting – providing more up-to-date financial information based on the ever changing needs of the business.
Forward-thinking implementers of SOA see opportunities in creating revenue streams from their IT investments – business services created for one business can be sold as services outside of their organization. Further, the ability to “discover” services can reduce the implementation time of a business need.
StoneDonut has the expertise and capability to assist SMBs with their SOA strategy and implementation. We assess the business value of an SOA implementation and provide facilitation and guidance towards creating a roadmap and proof of concept outline that will guide the SMB towards achieving business value with minimal cost and reduced risk |
