Empowering organisational change through SOA

Whatever the business challenges today, we will find there are matching IT imperatives. A service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a key element in aligning IT to support the demands of the business.

SOA is a combination of technologies and methodologies that allows a cross-enterprise, standards-based infrastructure to be built. It maximises the re-use of existing assets and infrastructure while providing the necessary security, reliability and maintainability for a true enterprise-class business.

In an SOA world, business tasks are accomplished by executing a series of services which have well-defined methodology in communicating with other services. Business processes need to be flexible and dynamic to respond to changes in the business environment, and should be composed from components that can be re-used.

Standards are the key to providing the interoperability required to make SOA effective. Standards allow the business and IT services to collaborate. Although many companies have adopted proprietary technologies for application integration, it is the evolution of Web services that provides the standards platform to align the business processes of a company with the underlying IT infrastructure for execution.

The business drivers for SOA include customer retention and service, operational efficiency and compliance, and can have significant business benefit as well as ROI. The evolution of an SOA is described briefly below:

* The first step is likely to be Web service enablement of existing applications, called legacy modernisation. It`s important to create a meaningful granularity of Web services, and to keep the Web services and applications loosely coupled. These two factors will ensure the future scalability of the SOA.

* Start combining the services to satisfy and implement a business process. This means modelling the business process and orchestrating the flow of the execution of the related business service, and should be achieved with business process management tools.

* Execute these business services within the IT infrastructure. This will involve getting data from multiple sources, combining it to make a meaningful decision in the context of the business process, and then taking action based on this information.

* The fourth step, full SOA, is the target to which all successful businesses should aspire. The goal of being an agile, responsive business that makes efficient use of both information assets and infrastructure, and creates competitive differentiation, can be achieved through the evolution and deployment of an SOA. You will be able to leverage your SOA infrastructure to effectively run, manage and modify your business processes. Your business will be effectively componentised into business services that can be composed and re-composed to implement the new business models that you need to succeed.

An SOA should evolve over time, and provide a framework to incorporate additional areas of functionality. The creation and re-composition of business models will require an environment for the development of composite applications. This requires both a composite application framework and a composite application user interface to deliver the application to the business user.

To enable business flexibility, we must provide interoperability within the SOA. This is done through metadata management, where all the component parts of the SOA become both synchronised and interoperable by communicating through the integration metadata repository. This is the Software AG vision for a service-oriented architecture.