It`s more than time for information technology to become simpler to use - and that`s why service-oriented architecture (SOA) is going to change all our lives for the better.
The evolution of information technologies since the first computer was built in the 1940s has been a bit like a sustained gold rush. Thousands of people and organisations with good and bad ideas about how to use a computer have staked their individual claims in specific areas of functionality. Not everyone struck it rich, but enough very different types of equipment and software have survived to make the general IT landscape pretty jumbled - and, therefore, difficult to steer your way through.
So, the IT challenge of today is to find ways to simplify what we`ve got and ensure that as IT evolves still further it doesn`t overwhelm us with yet more complexity.
The answer seems to be SOA - which is a good thing, because focusing on a single approach is a giant step towards keeping things simple.
But why SOA in particular? Because it allows software applications to share functionality in other applications, thereby reducing the complexity of individual applications as well as in collections of applications.
Why `services` rather than `functionality`? Because the word functionality tends to be associated with broad categories of business activities - such as customer relationship management, procurement, help-desk services, supplier relationship management and the like.
A service, by contrast, delivers a specific activity within a category of functionality - such as analysing an individual`s credit history or processing a purchase order. A service can provide a single discrete activity, such as converting one type of currency into another, or it can perform a set of related business activities, such as handling the various operations in an airline reservations system.
Multiple services can be used together in a co-ordinated way because, through generic interfaces among services, SOA enables the connection of applications (broken down into services) so that they can communicate with (and take advantage of) one other in a widespread and flexible way.
In other words, SOA allows us to not only keep all the good things of the past 65 years of IT evolution but also mix and match them in more relevant ways pretty much at will. It`s given us a simple way of recycling all the genius that has gone into creating technology so that users gets the benefits most meaningful to themselves - at the touch of the button.
I can hear the `yes buts` already. No, implementing SOA is not going to be expensive. In fact, industry research house Forrester strongly recommends SOA for businesses of any size precisely because it can be implemented on a small, near-term scale and later expanded as other business needs arise. It doesn`t trap organisations into trying to build an architecture now based on what they think they will need in five to 10 years.
Also, SOA works with existing infrastructures. That being the whole point of the industry`s quest for simplicity. SOA protects your legacy IT investment while giving you an operational flexibility you could only have dreamed of a year ago.
That`s why, by the end of 2005, Forrester expects to see more than 70% of large enterprises and 50% of small and medium businesses adopt some form of SOA in their organisations.
The only tricky thing about SOA is the way you adopt it into your business. And it`s only tricky because it means thinking about both IT and your business in a different way.
SOA is quite deliberately designed around business processes. It`s not designed around technology. In fact, it takes technology out of the equation. It makes technology invisible to the business in the way that paper and ink are now invisible to the business. You have to have paper and ink - along with electricity and desks and chairs - in order to run your business, but you take them for granted. With SOA, technology will recede into the same sort of background.
But because SOA is designed around business processes - integrating them, simplifying them, making them reusable in different, innovative ways - it will change the way you operate before it recedes into the background. In the same way as Graeme Smith needs to juggle the permutations of pitches, weather, opposition batsmen and his own bowlers in order to make the right decision about when to use his spin bowlers as opposed to his seam attack, you`re going to need to understand the implications of all the business process options SOA gives you in order to benefit from them.
These are not options businesses have had before, so they`ve not been practised a great deal. There`s a learning curve here, for us all. Not in terms of technology, but in terms of a new work dimension.
The place to start is in your IT organisation. It`ll need to shift from a focus on supporting technology systems to supporting business objectives. It`s a subtle but crucial distinction. It involves making business processes central to your IT organisation`s design processes. It means making technicians business savvy.
That`s not necessarily as irksome as it sounds - if the software solutions you acquire are services-enabled. FrontRange products, for instance, have always been built from a services point of view, though the term was not coined when we started doing so. Our solutions are therefore inherently business savvy. They enable enormous productivity gains through unprecedented flexibility of functionality. As a result, our customers` IT departments don`t have to become business specialists in order to support the organisation`s business objectives. And, by implementing the solutions, the IT departments automatically pick up the business principles involved - learning by osmosis how to use technology to improve a business scenario.
But, like any shift in emphasis in IT, it`s best to get advice on implementing SOA from IT providers that are well down the SOA road. SOA has been around as an active technology since 2003. There`s plenty of experience and expertise to call on - particularly among the established global software brands. Which helps to keep SOA - and your business options - simple.
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