Collaboration key to SOA success

Johannesburg, 12 Jun 2009

Merging the expertise of business analysts and IT architects can make service-oriented architecture (SOA) design and implementation more effective.

This was the message from Progress Software at its users' conference in Johannesburg yesterday, which focused on the business ideas and methodology of SOA and left talk of technology and products to a minimum.

Rick Parry, MD of Progress Software SA, said: “One must look at SOA from a business perspective and remember that it is not just about technology and products. SOA is a journey, a concept and a strategy.”

Harold van Aalst, chief enterprise architect for Progress Software EMEA, said: “Our belief is that SOA is a way for systems to work together in a loosely coupled way. It is a strategy that sees IT and business working together. One can't just think about the technology, one needs to think about the way people work and how services are used.”

In implementing SOA, Van Aalst said many companies believe there should either be a 'top down' approach - where business tells IT what to do - or a 'bottom up' approach - where IT tells business what to do. But Van Aalst says it should be a combination of the two.

“An increasing number of European companies have started to merge business analysts and IT architects to design SOA solutions for their companies and have even created a new department, known as the design department,” Van Aalst added. According to him, Progress Software fully supports such an initiative, as it brings IT and business much closer together.

Another message from Progress Software with regard to SOA is for companies not to get rid of their legacy technology with a complete overhaul, but to define the processes underneath and pull data together with application functionality.

Neville Nightingale, director at Vicitude Business Solutions, said service-oriented integration (SOI) is key in implementing successful SOA projects. “The two principles of SOI are that applications must not be aware of each other and that applications should speak a common business language,” he added.

Nightingale said the changing of applications should be kept to a minimum and stressed the importance of using existing application integration methods and having a common business language at the service bus that translates data destined for use in other applications.

Parry concluded: “The products and technology out there today are capable of building SOA, but an understanding of SOA and the expertise to implement it is what's needed now.”