Service-oriented architecture (SOA) helps CIOs unlock an organisation's static or even shrinking IT budget to focus on driving value-added innovation.
So says Simon Carpenter, director of strategic initiatives at SAP SA, who will provide an overview of the business case for SOA during the ITWeb Enterprise SOA conference, being held on 20 and 21 October at the Campus, in Bryanston.
“SOA offers the ability to be far more flexible and open than in the past, so savvy CIOs should be listening to their business counterparts to understand where the needs are. This includes surfacing for new ways of doing business, new or better ways of partnering across a network, and better ways of empowering staff,” says Carpenter.
He claims the model-driven capabilities enabled by SOA close the gap between IT and business. This means organisations can become more responsive with quicker time to value and less risk of missing the boat, he adds.
Down to business
According to Carpenter, any IT project, not just SOA, should be justified with a business case. “If it is not going to create meaningful business impact, either through cost savings or revenue growth, or better competitive positioning, then it should be seriously questioned because all it will do is consume IT budget and create future, possibly unnecessary, maintenance commitments.”
He adds that SOA projects should be critically evaluated for their ability to drive current and future innovation. “They typically help an organisation move towards an architecture and business process platform that is becoming more and more vital to success in today's globally networked value chain.”
ITWeb's Service Oriented Architecture conference
More information about the ITWeb SOA conference, which takes place on 20 & 21 October 2009 at The Forum in Bryanston is available online here.
Once initial investments have been made, says Carpenter, SOA results in reduced total cost of ownership over time because services can be re-used either through re-orchestration into new business processes, or to achieve greater standardisation across a business. In addition, SOA increases flexibility and speed of adaptability, which he says improves the business's strategic capacity to innovate.
Carpenter notes that one of the biggest challenges in deploying SOA is finding and keeping skilled enterprise architects who form a necessary bridge between the business strategy and IT and its architecture.
Other challenges include the business buy-in of SOA investments and the fact that governance of an IT environment can become fragmented and complex from a technology perspective.
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