Using SOA Solutions to Enable Business Agility

SOA provides a framework for designing, implementing, governing and securing business services. SOA also establishes business-level interoperability, which frees the business from the need to understand IT or the technology infrastructure itself.

SOA enables the enterprise-wide provisioning of business services, which are designed and built at the business level and delivered by IT as a defined and reusable catalog. When the business changes or requires a capability, new or revised business services are discovered, located and put to use. SOA moves IT away from its traditional application-centric approach to a service-centric end state, built around business services that are standardized, automated and ready for use. As a result, the entire IT stack is driven by the needs of the business.

The benefits of SOA include:

• Greater flexibility, by mapping technology into business-defined, self-contained services that are easily combined, shared and reused
• Faster response, by designing into the IT structure the ability to dynamically change services based on real business and operational events
• Maximum reuse, by enabling a cultural change within IT that breaks down silos and encourages configure-to-order solutions based on standardized services, rather than customized build-to-order applications

Effective SOA goes beyond technologies like middleware, because it is more about changing IT culture, structure and organization to deliver business services aligned with outcomes. SOA began by focusing on middleware technologies to support new industry standards for messaging, security and Web services. But it quickly became apparent that simply installing new tools and middleware was not going to transform the people, culture, organization and processes of business and IT to enable the practice of SOA. In fact, this very transformation is the key to any successful SOA implementation.

• Path 1: Architecture level. The first path involves transforming the existing architecture and processes of IT into a more agile, business-oriented architecture.
• Path 2: Application level. The heterogeneous IT environment and custom applications are transformed into a modernized application portfolio connected to one or more data centers. This streamlines IT operations and provides users with more effective IT capabilities.
• Path 3: Business service level. Business services are created using the modernized application portfolio within the framework of SOA. Using SOA and application modernization frees up funds for investment both in innovation for IT and in the business need to be more competitive.

Upon reaching the desired end state, IT has successfully restructured itself around the delivery of business services and has created the business agility it needs to drive the business forward through an ever-changing landscape.

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