SOA: Preparing Your Business & IT Products - Session 2

Overview

In this second session on Service-oriented Architecture the focus is on clarifying the business perspective and identifying the opportunities that could arise from using SOA. Using new technology solely for the sake of the technology itself is a recipe for organizational disaster. There must always be some clear identifiable advantage for using a new technology. This doesn’t have to take the form of immediate cost savings or producing new revenue streams but it should have direct and immediate benefit. For example, it might improve management reporting thereby enabling the management team to identify ways in which to make the organization more efficient.

SOA is not just a technology. Apart from the typical marketing hype that follows any new terminology, SOA can also be used as a lever for understanding the business processes for an organization. In fact, the first step in adopting SOA is to undertake an evaluation of the current business processes. From this it becomes possible to identify the ways in which the processes can be improved: some by using SOA technology.