Johannesburg, 27 Jun 2006
If anything, service-oriented architecture (SOA) today represents a partial and workable answer to one of the biggest drawbacks of computing: its lack of flexibility.
This holds the promise of automating business processes that run across different IT systems, whether inside a single company or spanning several business partners, a customer placing an order in one system could automatically trigger production requests in another and an invoice in a third.
However, in saying this, it is also important to bear in mind that the SOA forms part of a bigger picture of the road towards establishing improved investment in assets as well as overall service delivery. This roadmap has various components which include hardware, management software and application development.
To fully realise these improved investments in the above components of which SOA form a part of, a collective effort must be implemented. Importantly, the SOA is not a one-dimensional strategy, a lesson some companies have learnt the hard way.
This is also where security steps to the fore. How will we handle identity and rights administration in loosely coupled applications? This is not an easy question to answer, but organisations should explore these and other aspects before over-selling this important IT development.
Furthermore, what we have seen is that SOA principles have helped us to drive other industry initiatives like on-demand computing. On-demand promises IT-like utility, but requires some evolution in various aspects of the IT industry.
For example, vendors like CA have built their new age management platform on the SOA standards to enable effective data sharing and process execution. This step is necessary to enable vendor hardware strategies, therefore, delivering true maturity to the on-demand computing drive.
Quite obviously resource over-provisioning comes into play when implementing the above roadmap which is why companies should invest in architecture skills and architectural planning processes.
New-age architects should be trained to look at enterprise architecture from all dimensions. They must ensure they combine the various functions of IT, ie hardware strategies, applications strategies, security strategies, data backup and general management software into the planning process for SOA design.
Only when these skills have been realised can we as IT start delivering value as well as achieve our promises.
So, when planning your improved service-delivery and asset provisioning strategies, ensure you don`t simply turn to SOA but make sure that it forms part of a broader, more encompassing roadmap.
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