SOA MEANS "SERVICE-ORIENTED AGILITY"

SOA holds promise to finally make the word "agility" real for organizations. That's why the "A" in SOA, which stands for "architecture," could just as well stand for "agility." Service-oriented agility is one of the most oft-articulated goals of SOA. SOA enables business and IT agility along a number of dimensions. Although nearly every business and IT executive for the last 30 years has wistfully dreamed of achieving business agility, there has been little real progress toward that end save for a few exceptional firms. For most organizations, business agility is a vision without reality. Until now. SOA and services provide a means to achieving true business agility. Business agility can come from two broad forms: the ability to change business processes to meet changing market demands and customer requirements, and reduce costs; or the ability to execute business processes faster or launch new processes, products, and services faster. Agility and speed are both real and tangible benefits of migrating to SOA and reusable services.

SOA can help an organization unshackle its business processes and data from the IT systems that support or, in many cases, constrain them. Using a services approach and SOA, enterprise software systems will be decoupled from business processes through the use of business services. Business services will be defined as abstracted entities separate from the business logic that is locked within enterprise applications such as SAP, Oracle, Siebel, and other monolithic enterprise applications. When application logic is exposed as a business service, it becomes a shareable and reusable software asset, or service, that can be coupled with services from other applications to create new sources of business process value, completely new business processes, and even more efficient versions of existing processes using business process management (BPM) tools.

Service-Oriented Agility: Speed
One aspect of agility is speed. The ability of an organization to hasten its response to market changes or competitive threats, or to quickly preempt competitive moves from the competition, is clearly an advantage. Speed consists of two dimensions: the total elapsed time of a business action or response, and the speed of the IT component of the business action or response. Enhancing speed could require installing a new system, developing a new system, running a new report, or whatever the specific business requirement is to support of the business.

If the software development cycle of an organization is too slow for the business to respond to market changes or competitive threats, then the business does not have agility, and clearly IT doesn't have it either. SOA can create agility through speed via faster application development, which in turn will contribute to speedier business responsiveness to market conditions, competitive threats, and customer requests.

Service-Oriented Agility: Flexibility and Range of Response
Service-oriented agility can also be expressed as flexibility, or by allowing a greater range of options for a competitive response and making that response easier. An IT architecture can by its very nature limit the range of options an organization has to respond to market opportunities and customer requests. However, an SOA may offer a greater range of options by reducing the fundamental unit of IT to a business service.

Business agility and IT flexibility are always mentioned in corporate documents, in annual reports, and by business executives when they talk to analysts and customers. Agility and flexibility are among the most discussed and yet least achieved goals in corporate history. Part of the problem comes from a failure to operationalize the terms so they can be implemented and to put metrics in place to help realize them.

SOA: Agility Focal Point
SOA represents an opportunity to regain the agility and flexibility that many organizations lost in the 1990s with enterprise software applications and point-to-point home-grown and commercial integration models. SOA allows the creation of a services layer that resides between the business architecture of an organization and the IT architecture of an organization. We call this layer the agility focal point. This services layer is the decoupling abstraction layer that insulates business processes from IT changes and allows IT to change technology without changing business processes. Exhibit 1.8 depicts the concept of the agility focal point via an SOA.

Exhibit 1.8: SOA and the Agility Focal Point







An SOA implements the agility focal point concept by facilitating the flexing of the business and IT architectures—the SOA in particular—in response to business changes. SOA enables this strategic business capability, which allows an organization to compete based on agility, or service-oriented agility.

Competing on Service-Oriented Agility
With more IT flexibility and business agility, all organizations should be seeking faster time to market for new products and services; faster responses to business, competitive, and environmental change; and an overall better ability to quickly adapt both business processes and IT systems in support of change. In their seminal book Competing Against Time, Stalk and Hout discuss the notion of time-based competition and how those who are faster to market are more profitable than those who are not. [1] SOA enables many of these time-based capabilities by eliminating many of the traditional IT and business barriers to change (e.g., inflexible business processes, business processes locked up within rigid IT systems, inflexible IT architectures with rearview-mirror commitments to legacy systems, etc.). SOA and services provide a business solution to the problem of adapting to change, and this business solution is based on both the business and IT being able to adapt and respond quickly.

Regaining IT Flexibility: Breaking the "Rearview Mirror" Paradox
Much as agility is the Holy Grail for business executives, flexibility is equally sought after and is equally elusive for IT executives. For IT executives, their continual challenge is supporting the years of accumulated legacy systems and infrastructure in the face of shrinking budgets. SOA and Services provide a pathway toward breaking free of the rearview-mirror budgeting paradox. First, in order to inject flexibility into your IT architecture, you do not have to rewrite or refactor every legacy application or enterprise application in your portfolio. You merely have to begin exposing portions of business functionality as services that match to business process requirements of the organization. Second, most of the services you will target initially in your SOA initiatives are contained within existing applications. The challenge is to expose the business functions as reusable services that can in time be combined with other services into composite applications, orchestrated processes, and BPM solutions. Third, SOA is an incremental architecture, meaning that it is not implemented or attained in a big bang model. SOA is achieved over time by defining and adhering to a body of architectural goals, standards, and design guidelines so that all services will interoperate over time within and, when necessary, outside of your enterprise. SOA is the "anti-enterprise application" in that it encourages freeing services from inflexible application architectures imposed by others, namely software vendors, and begins to define your vision of services and business processes to better match the way you want to conduct business. Finally, the concept of business services can allow the IT organization to insulate itself from the constraints imposed by both its legacy systems and its more modern applications. SOAs future-proof your IT architecture. SOAs are built to accommodate change.

Why You Must Begin SOA Initiatives Now
With the analyst and media buzz about SOA, you may be asking yourself why you should believe it. What's so special about SOA that you need to invest your time and resources in this concept at this time? Why now, when you survived the past technology paradigms that were nascent attempts at SOA, namely CORBA, COM/DCOM, and others?

This time, the stars and moon are aligned in SOA's favor. We've covered many of these already, such as the unanimous agreement on the core standards of SOA, the cross-platform capabilities of SOA using Web services and these core standards, and the fact that IT maturity is now more able to assimilate the concept of SOA to drive a business result. There is so much discomfort with the current state of IT that something has to give, and in this case, it's the entire process of IT architecture and services delivery that has to be reconstructed.

SOA presents an opportunity to change the rules of the game. SOA will allow firms to compete using their SOA efforts along a number of business and IT dimensions. These firms will be applying SOA to their businesses to create service-oriented business.

These advantages will characterize SOA first movers:

Competitive advantage. If you beat your competitors to the SOA punch, you will have achieved competitive advantage on a number of fronts, including business speed and agility, IT cost and delivery, and customer satisfaction.

SOA cycles of learning. SOA first movers will gain the experience required to fend off IT vendors partners; you may as well preempt your vendors by getting in front of the SOA wave. If you're going to end up with services anyway, you may as well be prepared and ramp up your ability to consume and provide services.

Break the rearview-mirror budget crisis. There are two ways out of this situation: (1) fix your architecture process to suit an agile, changing services world and (2) stop integrating and service-enable instead.

SOA first movers will be in a better position to compete in a world of services, where vendors, customers, and business partners will all eventually transact via SOA and services. This is a world of service-oriented business, or business-oriented architecture.