"Business doesn't care about SOA, but the business value it delivers," says Con-way lead enterprise architect Maja Tibbling.
She was speaking to ITWeb from San Diego, California, where she was attending OpenGroup's annual Enterprise Architecture Practitioners conference.
Tibbling says for that reason SOA must be driven from the highest office in an enterprise's IT organisation, in concert with someone who can explain the business value in terms they care about.
Tibbling, casts SOA as an architectural style and a subset of enterprise architecture, saying there is a strong relationship between SOA and business process management (BPM), as SOA is an enabler of BPM.
She says selling SOA involves demonstrating business value, such as faster time to market, lower future development costs, the ability to implement new business ideas rapidly, better regulatory compliance, stepped-up security and real-time business.
According to Tibbling, real-time business has given Con-way a competitive advantage in a hotly contested transport market. She says immediate notification of any delays is valuable for customers.
The success of real-time notification has made it easier to convince the company to spend money on middleware, says Tibbling. "We have proven such value in real-time business that the company will continue to invest in that arena," she says.
Business can easily see benefit in key event and activity monitoring that gives executives real-time dashboards for their key performance indicators. "All of a sudden they are seeing new prosperity because of capabilities that IT has provided," she says.
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