Cutting costs and reducing the complexity of information technology seems like an unattainable dream for many businesses; you can do one or the other, but not both. Of course, business wants both and more. Companies today want IT to better support and integrate their processes, thereby reducing the complexity and costs of doing business as a whole.
In the current business world - with its increasing demands for information - 'IT-as-usual' is no longer an option. Business users today demand responsive systems that offer all the information they need, when they ask for it, without the delays due to system incompatibilities we have become used to. In a perfect world, a business would be able to select applications that meet its needs without worrying about who the vendor is or what platform each application runs on. In fact, buying business applications should be like buying a CD.
When buying an audio CD, for example, the consumer is only concerned about the artist and the music, not how the disc was made and if it is compatible with a specific CD player. You don't buy one CD that plays on your home entertainment system, another compatible with your car's audio system and yet another that works in your portable CD player. You buy one CD and all these devices provide the service of playing the music. The internal technology that makes the audio equipment work is irrelevant; all the buyer is concerned with is getting the service.
The same principles should apply to software in the business environment. The ability to purchase an application that works with everything already installed in a business may sound idealistic, but can be a reality in a standards-based world.
Instead of employing IT skills to integrate various components of the corporate infrastructure, a job that can take forever since each application upgrade can mean starting the integration process again, organisations should be looking at a service bus or an improved middleware layer to handle integration tasks in real-time. Commonly referred to as a service-oriented architecture (SOA), this technology consists of a set of software services that link users to applications and databases, while hiding the complexity of the communications process.
More formally, an SOA is a collection of services that are able to communicate with each other and the various components of the corporate IT infrastructure, but are completely independent and self-contained. The SOA's services hide the technical complexity of integration, making everything the user needs available at the press of a button.
When a user needs to get information from a particular database or access specific functionality from an application, the SOA translates the request into a language the individual components can understand and sends the request to them. The information contained in the reply is again translated and presented to the user in a suitable format.
In short, it is no longer necessary for businesses to feel pressurised into buying all their systems from the same vendor in the hope of avoiding integration problems. With an SOA approach, organisations can choose the applications best suited to their needs, sure that any interoperability will be handled by their SOA middleware.
Businesses can now focus on business instead of diverting resources to trying to make disparate systems talk to each other. The only catch is that the SOA must be based on open standards. However, this is more of a benefit than a catch as standards give businesses the freedom to choose systems best suited to their needs and environments without being subjugated to vendors and their whims.
Kelvin Reynolds, Executive Director: Enterprise Software Solutions at ITQ, a subsidiary of Simeka BSG
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