Bridging the SOA gap

Bridging the gap between IT and business is critical when deploying a top-down or bottom-up service oriented architecture (SOA) model approach.

This is according to Neville Nightingale, director of business solutions provider Vicitude, who will speak at the ITWeb Enterprise SOA conference being held on 20 and 21 October, at The Forum in Bryanston.

Nightingale says there are two main SOA approaches that businesses can take. The top-down model is essentially driven by business, as opposed to IT. “Business takes the initiative and designates a SOA champion who will own the process. The SOA champion should be someone with sufficient authority to drive the process, as it will inevitably be across departments, if not across divisions or even across subsidiary companies.”

The bottom-up model is where the process is driven by IT in an attempt to solve specific problems, explains Nightingale. He notes that application integration has evolved over time, leading to a spider-web effect; if one application is changed, this often impacts other applications. “It's almost like a fly landing on a spider web, the whole web shakes.”

According to Nightingale, the bottom-up approach is initially driven by the IT department and can produce quick wins. He says these quick wins are used to motivate the adoption of a more formal top-down approach, or a mixture of top-down and bottom-up approaches.

However, one of the biggest hurdles to a bottom-up approach is for the IT department to get business buy-in. Nightingale attributes this to the lack of direct visibility, adding that visibility is only achieved late into the SOA process when IT becomes more agile.

Another challenge businesses face when deploying an SOA strategy is ownership of common businesses services as IT systems are often spread over multiple departments using disparate applications. He says, ideally, companies should be using a centralised business service, but the problem comes in as to who to select as the SOA owner.

“The current IT infrastructure has probably evolved over a number of years, often over 15, 20, or even more years. This means they are carrying a number of legacy applications that need to form part of the SOA. This situation is often aggravated by the fact that the people who developed these systems are no longer with the company and documentation on the systems is inadequate or nonexistent,” he explains.

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