Enterprise SOA, Success Factors
SOA, from an IT perspective, is an Enterprise Integration technology
consisting of service definition, orchestration (BPMS/BPEL),
description (WSDL), registration, discovery (UDDI) and distribution
(ESB) technologies. Nevertheless, SOA is more than IT although its
origins are in IT.
From a business viewpoint, it is a way of
structuring a business as clusters of loosely coupled services.
SOA, apart from agility and reusability, enables:
• The Business to specify processes as orchestrations of reusable services
• Technology agnostic business design, with technology hidden behind service interfaces
• A contractual-like interaction between business and IT, based on service SLAs
• Accountability and governance, better aligned to business services
• Applications interconnections untangling by allowing access only
through service interfaces, reducing the daunting side effects of
change
• Reduced pressure to replace legacy and extended lifetime for legacy applications, through encapsulation in services
• A Cloud Computing paradigm, using Web Services technologies that
makes possible service outsourcing on an on demand, utility like,
pay-per-usage basis.
Nonetheless, SOA harbours developments that are in the scope of EA. It
does not specifically address IT alignment to business and strategy,
documentation of the As-Is Enterprise state or guidance for the
development program as EA frameworks do.
As both SOA and EA are usually
initiated by IT, the lack of business stakeholders' engagement and top
management support may foil the success of SOA.
SOA does require a large Enterprise re-engineering effort, with
consequences at all EA layers: business, applications, infrastructure
and organization.
The Enterprise SOA Critical Success Factors (CSF):
• Should be primarily approached
as a business development, a Business Architecture, a way to structure
the Enterprise, a style of target Enterprise Architecture and only then
as an IT integration technology
• May only succeed if developed inside an EA effort since SOA does not cover the Enterprise transformation process
• Driven only by IT, both SOA and EA are prone to fail; the business
stakeholders' engagement and firm's top management support are key to
success
• Business process re-engineering, a new governance around services and ultimately re-organization.
Enterprise SOA was pronounced dead because these CSFs were not
really met. Application level or Web domain SOA are alive and well
though.
Once implemented, an Enterprise
wide SOA becomes a competitive asset based on business services
accessed independently of technology and geography, agilely
orchestrated for change and ready for outsourcing in the cloud."
This post was published September ’09 in the 21st edition of the Microsoft Architecture Journal, as a column, downloadable here .
Posted
01-15-2010 10:31 PM
by
Adrian Grigoriu