Why business is the driver for SOA

The discussion of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has gathered momentum in the first six months of 2006. The IT world has been propagating the SOA revolution for some years, and now the time has come for business to take the driving seat. To gain the benefits promised by service oriented architecture, CIOs have to focus on business process and architecture – not just technology.

The technology of SOA is well covered elsewhere - this paper will therefore look at how and why it is vital for business to exploit the advantages on offer. SOA important because companies have an urgent need to increase their agility.

Few businesses operate in a stable environment. Regulations change, markets segment, and commercial pressures conspire to inflict relentless change. Organisations respond by merging, acquiring, de-merging and launching new products and services at an ever-increasing pace. An agile organisation addresses these changes in a holistic fashion, encompassing all three elements of People, Process and Technology.

Successful organisations execute such moves swiftly and without adverse effects on existing business.An SOA approach is also about reconnecting business and IT. The business process framework is the basis for the SOA enterprise architecture.

The business plan drives the SOA programme; the business itself defines the rationale for the Services; IT determines how they will be deployed; and business and IT together collaborate on what will be achieved
(1). Aligning IT with business is a familiar promise that has previously often remained unfulfilled. The reasons that we may be confident this time are made clear in the sections on loose coupling and BPM, later in this article.

Something old, something new – 1: E-business
A disappointment of recent history was the notion of “e business” that accompanied the dot-com boom, and retired shyly to the sidelines in the ensuing dot-com bust. One of the three main drivers of this period was the meteoric rise of the Internet*, which is directly attributable to the broad acceptance of the open TCP/IP networking standards as they rapidly usurped the vendor-proprietary standards that had previously prevailed. While Internet retailing has now become commonplace, the ambition of e business, to wit: “pervasive IT”, remains an ambition.

The advent of SOA and the standards on which it is based are the business-level equivalent of the TCP/IP revolution that created the Internet, and will perform a similar service for e-business.Not all business processes involve users navigating web pages and entering transactions. E business is about leveraging IT in all business processes, involving interactions between computers that don’t necessarily have browsers on them. They are typically application servers involved in back-office processes, supply-chain management, and processes spanning multiple applications. Attempts to create e-marketplaces for the automatic trading of products and services between companies failed because there were no standards to conduct this sort of automatic business.

Specific agreements for conducting electronic transactions had existed for some time, in the guise of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), but these tended to be inflexible, difficult to manage and unsuitable for broad take-up in a rapidly globalising world economy. They also pre-dated the Internet and required scarce, expensive private networks and proprietary networking protocols.

The Internet is cheap, globally ubiquitous and accessible to all; combined with the continued rapid improvement in cheap computing power and storage, the infrastructure is now in place for e business. Now we need the standards that will enable e business to offer application functionality into business resources for the business to access, manage and evolve as needed. And guess what? The same standardisation processes that have delivered the Internet have been put to work to give us just the set of standards we need for automated e-business.

Collectively referred to as the WS-* set of standards, they provide us with protocols for necessities such as messaging, security, authentication, policy management, etc. Non-proprietary and widely embraced by vendors, they enable the creation of tools and systems that will interact satisfactorily with those from any vendor. Business can now go ahead and create manageable processes in support of initiatives that cross organisational boundaries without stumbling over technological incompatibilities.

Something old, something new – 2: re-engineering
Re-engineering was a phenomenon of the 1980s and early 90s that offered great promise of increased efficiency and customer focus by breaking down organisational silos and replacing them with a business process-based structure. One of the main reasons it wasn’t a greater success was because IT wasn’t yet flexible enough to support the organisation of business based on critical processes. The limitations of IT constrained the ability of the organisation to change.

The advent of SOA means that the technical challenges to achieving business flexibility can be readily overcome, even if the management and human challenges remain substantial.

The corporation will no longer organise its IT department into application or system silos. The new vision for IT is one in which companies build flexible, agile resources that they share among departments, and where it’s the business processes that drive the resources, and not the underlying technology implementations. We have seen how business can get into the driving seat and derive the advantages that Service Orientation offers.

In particular, the opportunity to revisit the promises of e-business and re-engineering is too good to pass up. This is especially so since SOA has lowered the entry cost and removed the need for the big-bang approach, and since BPM now gives business the ability to determine how it will make use of IT’s rich resources.