Strategic Benefits of SOA

The biggest challenge of every organization is to centralize the information, stored in a heterogeneous/distributed environment. In business terms, how to make systems talk with each other running on different platforms, implemented in different technologies and serving different needs? An obvious solution to the problem is EAI (Enterprise Application Integration), a high-ticket and tedious way. EAI, as the name suggest integrates the applications but does it cater to all the needs, does it help in realizing your vision to grow and faster and most importantly, is it a need or a solution?

Some of the reasons why companies invest in IT, or rather why investors invest in companies who have more IT budgets? The answer is, maximizing profits and return on investments. EAI does give a one-time or short-term solution to the problem of centralization but it fails or requires another millions of dollar investment to serve another problem and that too, for a short term. To help an organization in making a strategic rather redundant investment, go with Service enabled architecture. What does it mean?

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a design paradigm comprised of design principles that shape solution logic into services with distinct design characteristics that support the realization of strategic goals associated with service-oriented computing. Some of the strategic benefits are as under,

Intrinsic Interoperability: One of the key benefits of SOA is to establish native interoperability by standardizing the interfaces and the interaction of the IT systems implemented across the organization/s. In today's competitive world, every organization is looking for best-of-breed IT solutions to realize the business problem. For example, Accounting System (A) takes care of the timesheet and invoicing the resources effort and Human Resource System (B) takes care of maintaining the resources information. At the end of the year, I want to develop an Appraisal System which could talk to the System A and System B to calculate the incentives to be awarded without any modification to be done to either System A or B.
SOA focuses on providing the standardized interface to every business solution (independent of technology) and thus can be leveraged in realizing an all-together different business problem.

Increased Confederation: SOA aims to increase the federated perspective of an organization through the standardized (platform & technology independent) and composable services (for example, combining services implemented on different specifications). Within the context of SOA, each service establishes standardized endpoints or official point of contact and hence realizes the enterprise solutions in a consistent manner. The advantage is the unification of the disparate environment to solve a business problem while continuing to be governed independently.

Increased Vendor Diversification Options: SOA design confirms the abstraction of implementation details (vendor specific) from the consumers by positioning services as standardized endpoints. This provides an organization with the constant option of quick to adapt with the best options available in the market and in a cost effective manner. For example, today Company A Order Support System is implemented in SAP that does not provide the feature of automatic procurement order generation after reaching a configurable level. Due to absence of this feature, business would like to go with another ERP system, which is huge investment. SOA provides the flexibility to just replace the inventory module or even less to make for the absent feature.

Increased Business and Technology Domain Alignment: Designing SOA a system is not only about abstraction but it also promotes accurate encapsulation of business logic by closely aligning the business people and technology gurus. Business Process Modeling (BPM) tools are business-centric and focuses on capturing the business needs and designed to be used by business domain analysts. This allows the in-depth participation of the business analysts in the overall design of the system, rather just a source-of-truth. The artifacts generated in capturing the business needs could be easily translated into physical design of the system.

Increased ROI: SOA fosters the creation of agnostic solution logic - a collection of reusable and multipurpose services. By implementing SOA solution, an organization becomes more agile as it will be able to compose new solutions from existing logic and reduces the amount of time spent on maintenance. The segregation of a complex business problem into smaller independent logical units helps incorporating the enhancements in a very cost effective manner. The monitoring aspect of SOA helps in identifying the bottlenecks and widens the scope of improvement. Money, Money, Money!

Increased Organizational Agility: The agnostic nature of the services gives the flexibility of repeatedly orchestrating them into different configurations. As a result, the time and effort to fulfill new or changed business requirements is significantly reduced. The time and money required to develop new business lines or to enhance existing business is exponentially reduced once the core services are in-house.

Reduced IT Burden: Consistently applying service-orientation results in an organization with reduced redundancy; reduced operational cost and development team; reduced overhead associated with governance and evolution. An IT infrastructure, inline with SOA benefits an organization through prominent increase in responsiveness and cost-effectiveness.