Owners must be accountable

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is the recording of how to design business services and analyse the impact of organisational change.

This is according to Vishal Mahabeer, senior manager for performance improvement at PricewaterhouseCoopers. “Designing a business from a service point of view requires that we start thinking about business from an output perspective,” says Mahabeer. “Having understood what the results of the business should be, businesses need to design the optimum processes required to deliver the promise.”

Mahabeer says businesses need to become flexible and services need to be autonomous. “The growing dependence on business agility is placing significant strain on IT to leverage current investments. This, coupled with the fact that continuity must be maintained along with increased budget constraints, has resulted in IT falling significantly short of business expectations.”

However, according to Mahabeer, SOA does not leave business blameless in the turmoil. IT departments have a responsibility to engage with business in such a manner that there are clear boundaries between the services they can provide, the services they could potentially provide, the services they could source elsewhere, and the services they are unable to provide, says Mahabeer.

“In future, the owners of the respective domains (business and IT) will have to take accountability and responsibility for the designs of the services,” he says.

Mahabeer emphasises the importance of business and IT collaboration, and says there isn't really an end to SOA, but rather a continuous improvement cycle.