The real SOA payback may not be cost savings but business agility:
When it works, SOA eliminates the slow, costly, and laborious process of repeatedly integrating applications every time something changes. Instead, services talk to services. Developers can reuse services, recombining them in different ways to create what amounts to new composite applications, and do it faster and cheaper than before.
• Specific functionality is extracted from an application in the form of a service.
• Services have a simple, standards-based interface and can send, receive, and act on messages, again standards-based, from other services.
• A service might ask another service to perform its function or request data.
• Data is exchanged in the XML format, which almost all systems, including legacy mainframe ones, can handle.
Rather than a fad, SOA is being internalized by the industry, both vendors and IT departments. Future directions — cloud computing, Web 2.0 — require functionality in the form of services. In a few years, people won’t talk about SOA and services; the connection will just be assumed. ###
SOA (service-oriented architecture) has become a religion in IT because it promises to be successful in its decades-long search to find the Holy Grail — a way to make different, otherwise incompatible, systems interoperate. Using a SOA-based approach, for example, finance systems can interoperate with ERP, sales, and engineering systems, merrily exchanging data and calling functionality from one or another as needed.
A service does not know (or care) how another service performs its task. It only makes or responds to requests for service. The actual systems behind each service run unchanged. If one of those systems has to be changed — in response to a regulatory change, for example — services that make use of the changed service are not affected.
SOA describes an approach in which:
Some industry analysts view SOA as a passing fad. Even Gartner reports that SOA adoption is slowing, although its own survey suggests otherwise. Critics also complain that SOA imposes a steep learning curve, making it difficult and costly to implement, and that the promised savings aren’t there.
Finance has attracted considerable SOA attention. The SOA finance net and BNET have each set up finance SOA resource pages. Many of the SOA resources address compliance issues, particularly Sarbanes-Oxley.
Gartner surveyed businesses in 2008 about SOA adoption and found 53 percent already using SOA in some part of their organizations, while 25 percent had plans to use it in the next 12 months. Only 16 percent reported no plans to use SOA.
There certainly is a learning curve Big Fat Finance, but I’ve written enough SOA case studies that document legit business payback. The savings come over time, once you’ve reused services a few times.
Even within the finance function, SOA promises to streamline the flow of information and processing between finance applications through the use of services. Payables, cash management, fixed asset, and GRC could work together seamlessly. And, since reusable services are the vehicle enabling this, the organization saves money every time a service is reused.
• The speed at which you can integrate applications
• The ability to change systems easily when the business changes
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