Most companies today are being pressured by their customers and shareholders to drive growth by improving productivity and limiting costs in every aspect of the operation. But it is impossible to maximize efficiency if the company has rigid, expensive, proprietary IT systems. In fact, the most valuable thing a company can buy itself as an organization is flexibility, that is, flexibility to meet new market demands and seize opportunities before they are lost. To increase flexibility, the company has to look at its business as a collection of interconnected functions, discrete processes and services, such as check customer credit or authenticate user, and then decide which of those functions are core or differentiating, and which can be streamlined or even outsourced. If the company can mix and match these functions at will or on the fly, in response to changing business conditions, the company will have a tremendous competitive advantage in the marketplace. It is a powerful idea. But to achieve this degree of flexibility in the business operations, the company will need an equally flexible IT environment. It needs a service-oriented architecture (SOA).

As defined for the business person, an SOA is an application framework that makes it easy to reuse and combine the discrete business processes and services that make up the business. Think of it as a mosaic made up of individual functional components that can be arranged and rearranged. With an SOA, the company can build, deploy, and integrate applications and link heterogeneous systems and platforms together across the organization. While the SOA concept is not new, it has yet to reach its full potential, because most applications are still integrated using custom code, such as hardwired, and making it slow, difficult, and costly to rearrange the pieces in the mosaic. The industry has been waiting for a way to standardize the connections among all those components so they work the same way everywhere without requiring any programming. That standardization has finally arrived in the form of Web services.

Common components and common information from business processes can be reused multiple times in an SOA to give the company’s customer varied experiences. For example, information about a car is a static commodity, but its presentation can be dynamically based on perceived user preferences.

Dynamic presentation using the automobile

SOA for the business person

Service-oriented architectures are all about connections. A good analogy to explain SOA is the connections used in audio-video (AV) systems as shown in the figure below. (Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures, The Savvy Manager's Guide, Your Roadmap to Emerging IT" ©2003, Douglas K Barry, pp 17-19.) Specifically, services in an SOA are similar to the components in an AV system. Web services are the connections between the AV components. For example, consider an AV system that has components that have been purchased over the years. Assume you want to add a DVD player to the system. The system has the usual cable box, receiver, VCR, CD player, speakers, and television set. One of the oldest components is the receiver, and the DVD has connections that the receiver can not handle, such as s-video and optical connections. It does, however, have the common three RCA connections. You decide at this point to change all of the connections in the AV system to RCA connections. These components could be connected in different ways, depending on what you want to do. For example, you could set up your cable connection to go through your VCR or split the signal so that you can watch one program and record another. It was not too long ago that everyone had monolithic hi-fi or stereo systems. Then the industry settled on the various components in a stereo system, and later video was added. What does this have to do with SOA? It is all in the connections. Web services provides an infrastructure for creating connections similar to those with AV systems. And, just like AV systems, a user can assemble components in all sorts of ways because of those connections. An SOA is essentially a collection of services. Services execute business processes. These services or business processes communicate with each other. The communication can involve simple data passing, or it could involve two or more services coordinating some activity. Some means of connecting services to each other is needed. Those connections are Web services. Note: The choice of the name Web services as the connection medium for "services" is somewhat unfortunate as it generates much confusion. When you see the term Web services, just think connection, or in the case of the AV example, you think of the RCA cable.

In the preceding figure, the entire picture represents the SOA. The services or business processes are the AV components and the cables numbered 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 represent Web services, the connection mechanism.

• Determining the company’s core competencies
• Identifying an outsourcing strategy
• Defining a plan to reduce complexity of the company’s shared IT infrastructure needs with its trading partner community, such as cost

Change comes in many forms:

• Marketplace
• Technology
• World at large

Companies that make effective use of a changing environment compete more effectively and thrive in any business climate. They are particularly adept in tough economic times, often finding opportunities in the midst of chaos.

Information technology is at the center of business agility discussions. Achieving agility begins with removing the hindrances that impede it, and the hindrances are usually in the IT infrastructure. In fact, companies are accustomed to the idea that IT creates hindrances within their organization and that technology and its limitations often drive business decisions. To meet the needs of the agile enterprise, an organization must follow the following core SOA principles:

• The business drives the services and the services drive the technology — In essence, services act as a layer of abstraction between the business and the technology. From the business perspective, the services represent the available software functionality. Therefore, the line-of-business can focus on business goals and not on systems and applications.
• Business agility is the fundamental business requirement — The ability to respond to changing requirements is the new meta-requirement for business. The entire architecture, starting with the hardware, must support the business agility requirement. Any hindrance to increased agility in an SOA implementation can substantially reduce the flexibility of the entire IT environment, and hence the business as well.
• A successful SOA is always changing — An IT environment is undergoing constant change, and as a result, the work of the service-oriented architect is never done.

Agility will be enhanced as services are used to remove the constraints of a static IT infrastructure, creating greater flexibility for strategic planning.

An SOA provides business agility in three ways: loose coupling, reuse, and extensibility.

Business agility SOA catalyst: Loosely coupled

Loosely coupled services are ones that no longer require the same technological implementation at each end of the connection. A simple mechanism connects applications regardless of the devices they use or their location.


Loosely coupled benefits of an SOA

Extensibility is defined as the ability to enlarge scope or operation. One of the primary business benefits of SOA is the ability to easily expand internal operations with new functions and to easily access organizations outside the enterprise.

Over the years the interaction with trading partners has gone through a few iterations. The goals of business-to-business have changed from reduced transaction costs to improved process efficiencies to finally, SOA and its connection ease.

Business interaction models approaches compared

Business services are involved with the provisioning and consumption of business interactions. It is critical that you understand what is contextual and what is core. A business service is a process or subprocess within or between enterprises. Defining a service and configuring it to be customer-specific is the essence of business services. SOA and Web services technology can be utilized to enable enterprises to provision and consume business services. The technology can be utilized to enable enterprises to:

• Provide: Create business services that leverage existing core competencies of companies that can be offered to existing or new trading partners
• Consume: Consume business services from another trading partner that they view as better suited to provide such a service

In extending outward from the enterprise, an SOA can significantly aid in reducing costs.
Extensibility benefits of an SOA

SOA and Web services make infrastructure widespread. With widespread infrastructure, business services can be provisioned and offered to any trading partner. Enterprises are deploying Web services in the context of migrating to an SOA to drive more connections with their trading partners, which can make a better case for return on investment. Lower connection costs are driving the case.

Business agility for competitive advantage is the fundamental business requirement. SOA makes this possible.