Sam Gentile's Blog

Last time, in Part 1, I discussed a multi-part vision for an SOA series with examples in WCF, BizTalk, ESBs, and Neuron. I also talked about the Symptoms of The Problem, and why people are even considering SOA. The bottom line, I asserted, is that IT had to become more Dynamic to support the Agile Business.

I said, back here, some of this which I will repeat, " any definition of SOA must encompass the business drivers and business reasons, as SOA is not really about technology. It is about a better alignment of business and IT through business processes and services. The goal is to create a dynamic, more Agile and Dynamic IT that can respond quickly to new business opportunities and threats by quickly assembling new capabilities from putting together composite applications (and even Mash-ups) from reusable business services.

The business issues are the drivers causing SOA. We have gotten into a mess in many companies. IT departments are locked in a proprietary mess of legacy systems, averaging 80% of their budget spent on maintenance instead of developing the capability to shift IT to a strategic asset. Thus, when the business tries to act quickly, IT is not agile enough to respond. Everything takes 6 months or can't be done. Reports have to be obtained from 4 different systems, none of which talk to each other. Businesses have had wave upon wave of methodologies and efforts such as EAI, only to end up with only two tightly-locked systems now "integrated" instead of a loosely-coupled array of business assets and processes that can be reused and redeployed at will.

SOA or Service Enablement can transform a company's existing array of heterogeneous, distributed, complex and often inflexible IT systems into a set of more connected, simplified and adaptable ones that can better support the business. However, technology is not the predominant factor, neither is REST or WS-*. It has to begin with a focused understanding of what underlying business needs that have to be addressed. From there, my experience has been that a simple, pragmatic and incremental approach ("Agile") is best, gaining greater business agility by connecting disparate data and systems into new higher-order services. In this sense, SOA is not at all about "reinventing the wheel" but instead allowing businesses to gradually and incrementally leverage existing assets and "enable the changes needed for the agile business."

There are a lot of demands on IT. How can IT/Dev drive down spending on maintenance, improve its ability to deliver innovations, and at the same time, empower business users for even greater productivity? IT needs to invest but where? That's the subject of efforts like Microsoft IO which we will cover soon. In a nutshell, you cannot improve unless you know where you are already in terms of your overall infrastructure.

Let's talk about some of the business benefits of SOA:

·      SOA is not about technology (BizTalk, etc); it’s about representing what the business does. Services automate business processes and create business value from the flexible use and reuse of the processes.

·      Technology does not drive business outcomes, people do.  An enterprise’s most important asset is its people.

·      Business/IT Alignment – SOA provides the policies, practices, and frameworks used to ensure real synchronization between the business and IT to provide the right business services. A Service Oriented Architecture provides a platform for a far more agile IT environment by enabling IT professionals meet a company’s changing business needs and priorities.

·      Increase customer access to company resources and information, and improve customer retention through faster sales and more efficient services.

·      Enables a dynamic application environment that supports business growth, increases competitive advantage, and helps control costs – IT systems need to be agile. So as you have a new supply chain partner, or a new way of connecting with customers, the IT platform should *enable* the new business process by providing a high degree of agility. Microsoft is driving hard to deliver industry-leading SOA and BPM solutions. Business process has really become the language that bridges the business and the IT development shops, so having a business process capability or the ability to take advantage of business process is very critical.  And then of course looking at service orientation and how you look at the architecture all up in order to enable a great application environment is another key piece. A well-crafted SOA will increase agility over time.

·      Expanded reuse of existing IT assets and functionality – The solution is not to rip and replace systems or applications, nor to completely renovate them, but rather, finds a way to leverage existing IT investments so that overall organizational goals are supported effectively.  A Microsoft-based Service Oriented Architecture can achieve this.  SOA is actually likely to extend the lifespan of existing applications by gradually exposing their core functionality as an increasing number of reusable services.

• IT moving to a progressively more dynamic state, connected through a service orientation, aligned with business process and delivered/consumed by users in a convenient and valuable way with end-to-end experiences - Connected systems that are linked through service orientation and loosely coupled: meaning that systems are connected in a flexible way that supports rapid innovation and systems delivery for the business.

Next episode: we get into the contentious area of trying to define SOA and then the fun really starts :)