ABSTRACT: Few other innovations in IT offer the transformative potential of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA is centered around a transformation of the enterprise IT architecture into a set of services that can be shared and reused across application development initiatives. This introduces new levels of business agility and drives down IT costs.
Those organizations without a strategy for SOA risk being outperformed by competitors that are better equipped to serve customers, seize opportunities, and respond to changes. The successful deployment of services requires the ability to manage the quality of these services so organizations can optimize the use of IT resources and reuse services across multiple applications to enhance business agility.
The shift toward SOA is not risk-free. Many moving parts must work together closely amid constant change. Services have diverse characteristics. With SOA comes multiple stakeholders—such as service providers and service consumers—and services have independent lifecycles tied to how they are developed and maintained. Successful implementations of SOA require that services remain interoperable despite all of the inevitable changes they face. SOA introduces increased complexity to IT, and these complexities center on new relationships that need to be managed. There are technical relationships, since services depend on infrastructure and applications depend on services. But there are also organizational relationships. Providers of services need to collaborate across roles and functions to define, develop, and manage services, and consumers and providers need to collaborate to negotiate SLAs and other terms and conditions for using a service.
Throughout the lifecycle of a service, providers are inevitably going to change the service and consumer needs are inevitably going to evolve. Organizations need to be able to address ongoing questions throughout the lifecycle of a service.
<<Back
