Business Agility @ Service Oriented Architecture
We live in a constantly changing world. Technology and businesses are changing, emerging, and improving at a faster pace than everbefore. Business want the power to deliver products and services better and more
efficiently, to be able to excel, capture new opportunities, and
sustain competition. Technology innovation and improvements are striving to deliver on these requirements. From a business perspective, dynamics of such fast-changing world in terms of
technology can be daunting in terms of time to market cost, maintenance, training, and support. Replacing or re-writing entire systems
every time for new and improved functionalities is definitely a major concern.
Is IT just an unavoidable cost?
Arguments about IT being a cost are not rare in businessworld. There is no doubt in my mind that innovations in IT systems have
propelled business abilities and enriched business processes in past years.
Definitely, there is high business value gained from IT systems. At the same
time organizations also have to deal with the "cost" components that
come with IT systems such as maintenance, support, enhancements, training etc.
The argument from my perspective, should not be about the
classification of cost components, but how all the components and their
interactions can be simplified to provide more value to the business.
I think simplicity can help!
Simplicity is highly desired in increasingly complex worldon IT. Direct incentives of infusing simplicity in IT architecture are
tremendous and do not require elaboration.
Direct derivative of simplicity in IT architecture approach
is Business Agility.
Simply put, "Simple is Powerful"
SOA translates to business agility. SOA is simple but very powerful architecture approach
for complicated systems and problems of IT world.
SOA as it relates to software paradigm is an agile architecture approach that
is based on service-oriented principles of composition, abstraction, loose
coupling, discoverability, and amalgamation. SOA inherently empowers
scalability, evolution of services, interoperability, reusability, and
modularity.
Following diagram identifies high level concepts infused into SOA that help enhance business agility for an enterprise.
Inherent Interoperability
SOA empowers Inherent Interoperability between systems, business processes, and people (organizations).
Re-usability
Reusability factor in case of SOA is multi-fold because of standard based interfaces. Reusability is not new in software; what�s new is reusability across diverse systems, platform, and technologies. SOA components can be reused not only by the inherent system or technology but also by any system or process.
Modularity and Composition
SOA encourages Modularity that enhances the concept of Composition. Composite applications can be build based on changing business requirements and rolled out faster with less cost.
SOA Delivers
SOA enables faster development turn-around time,faster realization of new inter and intra enterprise business processes, and
cost effective maintenance and upgrades.
All this translates to enhanced Business Agility. And I would like to call it.....
Business Agility @ SOA
