The point about service-oriented architecture - or enterprise services architecture (ESA) - is that it does away with the need for human beings to have to know how information and communications technology (ICT) systems work in order to get information out of them and then apply that information to business processes.
Systems administrators, if you think about it, are actually human integrators - with an impossible job. The volumes of data and the multiplicity of possible combinations of applications and systems make manual integration impractical.
Also, most enterprise architectures today are dominated by big suites of enterprise-wide applications designed to integrate disparate corporate information systems via a rigid, uniform structure. That rigidity, once so desirable, now makes it difficult to change business processes quickly and cost-effectively, and therefore inhibits business agility and responsiveness.
Technology was born, more than 40 years ago, as a work enabler. But its true potential has always been as change enabler.
Dr Wolfgang Schaper, SAP AG director of solution management: ERP
Technicalities aside, it`s counter-intuitive in human productivity terms for system administrators to have to redo the system landscape every time the organisation`s executives want to change a business process. The operational improvement achieved is rarely worth the effort expended.
The answer, then, is for business users to be able to change business processes themselves, without reference either to the underlying technology or technology specialists.
But, delivering that capability has not been easy - because it has called for a reversal of traditional thinking about ICT and, indeed, about business.
Technology was born, more than 40 years ago, as a work enabler. But its true potential has always been as change enabler. Both technology providers and business are only just recognising and exploiting that potential - by finding ways to give command over technology to business users.
Currently, ESA is the best means of doing that. It breaks down overall business processes into their component parts or `services`, creates interfaces among the services, and publishes them as text blocks - along the lines that made HTML such a ubiquitously useful language. The services are incorporated into a visual composer, so that any businessperson wanting to re-arrange a business process can simply assemble the relevant blocks in the required combination on the screen.
But ESA is simply a blueprint, a framework. It needs to be implemented via an integration and application platform, that converts multiple systems into a single system landscape - making it easy and simple to connect systems, create composite applications and set up new business processes and, thereby, revolutionise the speed and effectiveness with which businesses create competitive advantage.
Sounds good on paper, doesn`t it? But I can hear you saying that it`s probably expensive. Not so - if both the platform and the blueprint are standardised and system-independent. Then organisations don`t have to redesign their existing systems or applications. They don`t have to migrate from one application to another. And they don`t have to buy new licences. They simply plug in the services they need on top of what they already have.
For instance, you may have a unique manufacturing process, but certain services within that process - such as invoicing or creating an order - will not be unique. So, a standardised invoicing or ordering `service` can simply be inserted into the overall process.
Also critical to ESA`s affordability is the fact that there is no secret about how it is done. Independent software vendors and internal developers don`t need a licence to develop new functionality using services.
At an ICT industry level, of course, ESA changes the game completely. Until now, most technology vendors have been focused on locking their customers in to their own products. Systems have been just open enough to allow competitor applications to interface relatively easily.
And while there`s been a lot of talk in recent years about ICT becoming a utility like telecommunications, electricity or water, competition among technology providers has never diminished to the point where one system has been entirely interchangeable with another.
ESA, however, introduces an unprecedented level of ubiquity and universality of ICT functionality. There will, of course, always be room for niche ICT solutions. But the over-riding and most basic business need will be for providers whose brand is only important because it is not visible to the business user - whose technology underpins every aspect of an organisation`s operations, but is used so easily and naturally by the organisation`s employees that they don`t even realise they are working with technology.
Successful technology of the future will be as transparent to the user as his or her own thought processes. We think a word and write it down without paying any attention to the neurons, arm and fingers we`ve used in the process. The thought and the outcomes seem instantaneous. In the same way, eventually, we won`t be conscious of technology. That`s where ESA is taking us.
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