Upthrust

Information systems and enterprise application have fundamental assets of companies and they rely on them to perform business operations. Information systems can help organizations to improve efficiency and reduce costs by automation of business processes. But in reality these applications should align with business processes with the change of market conditions and flexibility and agility of enterprise information systems are become more important than ever.

Service oriented architectures (SOA) are currently a hot topic and touted as a key to business agility and solution to a most problems in enterprise information systems. But the success of SOA is totaly depending upon the alignment of purpose and objectives between IT and business. In their latest article, IBM’s Jens Andexer and Willem Bekker from Standard Bank provide some sample of the good, the bad and the ugly business aspects of SOA.

They have divided impact on business by SOA into several categories and described the pros and cons of each.

Agility

• The good: Two main concepts behind SOA are reuse and loose-coupling. By reusing existing applications you can create new applications. And by applying loose-coupling you can minimize the impact of change, and therefore it’s easier to adopt your software to changing requirements. So SOA allows organizations to reduce time to time to market and adaptability and this will increase competitiveness of your organization.
• The bad: Requirement of introduction of new entity(Center of Excellence) which provides technical expertise to the rest of the organization can leads to conflicts among the different sections of the organization.
• The ugly: Transforming organization to become service oriented can be complex and expensive. In addition to that there is no shortage of opponents to the change.

Alignment

• The good: Alignment of IT functionality to business functionality and describing IT functionality in business terms, SOA facilitates a closer collaborative relationship between business and IT.
• The bad: Placing the ownership and control of services into the domain of business changes the power structure in organizations. This is typically met with resistance from those who have a vested interest in keeping the status quo.
• The ugly: Implementing SOA in your organization not only require change in technology aspects, it also require change in organization structure and culture. The organization must learn what is meant by agility and how to effectively use SOA. the ugly truth is that this is the one of the difficult lesson to learn.

Business Process Improvements

• The good: When applying SOA to your organization, it involves business process re-engineering. This will help organizations to improve their existing business processes.
• The bad: When implementing SOA, business must involve in defining services and designing of the IT systems. This is not the typical role played by the businesses and it’ll become uncomfortable change.

Flexibility

• The good: Good software engineering practices enforced by SOA will make IT to be more responsive to the changing business needs.
• The bad: Introduction of services make complexities of the IT a secret. But on the other hand SOA implementations typically depends on the set o technologies like business process execution engines, ESBs and etc.
• The ugly: An SOA initiative is founded on the promise of delivering business value quicker and cheaper than before. But SOA that is too technology focused is unlikely to deliver on that promise since they will not show value in terms business people want to see it.

Data Unification

• The good: Interoperability is a aspect of SOA. The design of inter-operable service interfaces provides an opportunity for data unification across enterprise IT systems. Unified here means common:
  • Structure – the structural relationships between elements is the same
  • Semantics – semantic refers to the meaning and use of the data. Data must have a consistent meaning and must not be used in a way that can be misleading
  • Format – how data is represented is important
  • Type – A type is determined by the representation of data and the set of behavior that can be performed on it
  • Timing – Timing refers to when an attribute is updated
  • Life cycle – under what circumstances data is add to data bases and when it is updated and when and how it is finally deleted from data bases
• The bad: Typically this type of data unification doesn’t exist. Trying to develop it often shows how disparate views in the organization may be.
• The ugly: It hard to address all the characteristics of consistent data and the ugly truth is that unifor service interface is very difficult to build.

Operational Monitoring

• The good: The technologies and principles used to enable a SOA make monitoring business process easier. This allows organizations quickly adopt their systems to meet their business goals.
• The bad: But building a system that can actually provide valuable outcome requires specialist skills.

Leveraging Operational Systems

• The good: In most scenarios SOA use existing systems to supply the business functionality to services. This will reduce the costs while allowing organizations to use their money for further improvements in their businesses.
• The bad: In some cases it’s hard to repackage existing systems in to services.
• The ugly: In some cases operational systems may need to be changed or additional logic/implementations might be required.

Summary

“For SOA to be a success, business and IT must align there purpose and objectives. IT driven SOAs fail because they are perceived as a change in technology that has no direct benefit to business. The case for SOA must strengthen the organization’s existing goals and strategy and this goes beyond an IT centred approach. This represents a culture change to where business expectations drive the priorities for IT which when coupled with a culture of co-operation between business and IT lays the ground work for success.”

Via InfoQ.