With all the big drum beat about Service Oriented Architecture there are different degree to which people appreciate the value that SOA bring to the business. It might quite well be discarded a new found 'fad' or as the new found 'silver bullet' by the over enthusiastic and that has panacea to almost every type of business problem. Also, often people confuse it with a technology rather than an enterprise architecture design style or merely a label associated with a bulk of technologies. Much in the same way the ERP systems were described a few years back.
The problem with such description is that it makes it difficult for the business users who has stakes in his IT infrastructure difficult to objectively understand the basic need for change and/or understand the short comings with its own application which might be plugged the SOA way. Hence, much of important decisions are taken based on the political affiliation of participating organizations.
In not too distant past, ERP helped the industries control the chaos by establishing industry best practices. They provided those functionalities out-of-the-box. However, they attempted to solve the problems in an 'All-or-Nothing' manner. That is, even though they brought tremendous value to business through standardization of processes but they also required complete over-haul of the organization leading to unrest(to people) as it required a dramatic shift in the organization culture. Also, in case an organization does recognizes a 'particular-process' which differentiates it from the rest of the world and 'want-it-their-way' implementing that would amount to uncontrolled complexities creeping into the system thereby making them costly to maintain and upgrade with time.
SOA allows an organization to mature its IT infrastructure and application to increasing levels at their own pace while keeping them in control of the cost and complexity. It allows organizations to have 'their' processes implemented 'their' way and also allows them the agility to change them as deemed necessary. Again, the idea to drive home is that the SOA based applications are designed to absorb change (which is in turn is constrained by our abstraction of the system). Further, with the advent of new delivery models like SaaS in a multi-tenant scenario you may only pay for the portion of services which you consume which may be very well be monitored by utilities based upon Autonomic computing techniques thus giving you greater visibility and efficiency to your enterprise system.
The crux of the matter is pick the right solution for the right application and when it matters model it the SOA way and stand out from the crowd!
The problem with such description is that it makes it difficult for the business users who has stakes in his IT infrastructure difficult to objectively understand the basic need for change and/or understand the short comings with its own application which might be plugged the SOA way. Hence, much of important decisions are taken based on the political affiliation of participating organizations.
In not too distant past, ERP helped the industries control the chaos by establishing industry best practices. They provided those functionalities out-of-the-box. However, they attempted to solve the problems in an 'All-or-Nothing' manner. That is, even though they brought tremendous value to business through standardization of processes but they also required complete over-haul of the organization leading to unrest(to people) as it required a dramatic shift in the organization culture. Also, in case an organization does recognizes a 'particular-process' which differentiates it from the rest of the world and 'want-it-their-way' implementing that would amount to uncontrolled complexities creeping into the system thereby making them costly to maintain and upgrade with time.
SOA allows an organization to mature its IT infrastructure and application to increasing levels at their own pace while keeping them in control of the cost and complexity. It allows organizations to have 'their' processes implemented 'their' way and also allows them the agility to change them as deemed necessary. Again, the idea to drive home is that the SOA based applications are designed to absorb change (which is in turn is constrained by our abstraction of the system). Further, with the advent of new delivery models like SaaS in a multi-tenant scenario you may only pay for the portion of services which you consume which may be very well be monitored by utilities based upon Autonomic computing techniques thus giving you greater visibility and efficiency to your enterprise system.
The crux of the matter is pick the right solution for the right application and when it matters model it the SOA way and stand out from the crowd!
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