SOA - An Important IT Strategy
By
Katherine Noyes
E-Commerce
Times
Part of the ECT News Network
09/25/07 4:00 AM PT
SOA is a hot topic in the IT world, and many view it as the next stage in
the evolutionary process for companies and the IT that supports them. "SOA
is inevitable," Charles Abrams, research director with Gartner, told the E-Commerce Times. "The misconception is that people
think they can make a decision to go SOA or not go SOA."
Entering Lego
Land
OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information
Standards, defines SOA as "a paradigm for organizing and utilizing
distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership
domains."
That's all well and good, but it can be a lot more useful to use
metaphorical terms. Think instead of SOA as a set of Legos.
"In the old days, IT was basically thought of like Silly Putty -- you
could build anything you wanted, but everything had to be done in custom
fashion," Miko Matsumura, vice president and
deputy CTO at WebMethods and committee chair at
OASIS, told the E-Commerce Times.
Continuing the toy metaphor, the second era of IT was "the toy car era
-- you bought everything preassembled in one giant package," Matsumura
explained. With SOA, we have now entered the Lego era. "You
can basically get anything you want, it's just a question of putting together
the pieces," Matsumura said.
Assemble to Order
Let's say a company wants a metaphorical car -- a metaphor for some
strategic capability. In the Silly Putty era, of course, it would have had to
build it by hand in a relatively slow and expensive process. In the next era,
the company would have bought the whole thing ready-made. The problem then,
though, was that if business conditions changed and the company decided what it
really needed was a metaphorical boat, it would have been out of luck.
"It was like ERP (enterprise resource planning)," Matsumura
explained. "Companies bought a big solution and then found out it didn't
do some things they wanted it to.". In the
Lego world of SOA, on the other hand, "it's a kind of assemble-to-order
computing," he added. You simply snap together the right pieces, and what
you want is what you get.
To see why that's so compelling, imagine now that you're a toy
manufacturer, and you learn that toxic paint is being used in some of your
product line. You need to move quickly across multiple business processes,
searching your supply chain to find the problems, identifying and establishing
relationships with new suppliers, going back into your distribution network to
find the bad products and recall them.
"All these things are more swift and comprehensive with SOA because
you can quickly reconfigure your processes," Dana Gardner, principal
analyst with Interarbor Solutions, told the E-Commerce Times. "SOA provides excellent
agility."
Focus on Business Services
Returning to the Lego metaphor, one thing that's critical to understand is
that the building blocks of the enterprise and its IT are not functions or applications
or other units of computing, but rather business services -- with an emphasis
on the "business" part.
"A business service has to have a business meaning," Matsumura
explained. "If you describe a business service to a business person and
they don't understand what you're talking about, then it isn't a business
service." In some ways, a business service is almost like an iPod, he added: "It does only one thing, but it does
it perfectly and it fits in with the other things you want to do."
By reconfiguring itself into a collection of business services, the whole
idea is that an SOA enterprise can "snap" those services together as
needed for multiple different kinds of solutions.
External Links
Let's take a bank for example. One of its business services might be a
customer identity service, which records basic information such as customer
names and addresses. Another service might be a loan application service, which
would take down information about how much money a customer wants to borrow and
other related information. What might happen then is that the loan application
service might connect with a credit reporting service outside the organization.
That, in turn, gets back to the OASIS definition's notion of using
capabilities under the control of different ownership domains. "What's
interesting about these Legos is that you can
assemble them from all over the place," Matsumura explained. "They
don't all have to be under the same roof."
If a company wants to do something involving business services it doesn't
have, that's a signal that it might need to partner with another firm --
"snap in someone else's Lego and make them part of your virtual
enterprise," Matsumura said.
The world of SOA then becomes a world of mashups, where what you're mashing
up is business services. "What becomes really
important is your customer, and what your customer wants to have happen,"
he said.
New kinds of competitive business decisions can follow. For example,
"if I'm a phone carrier, should I merge with a TV station?" Matsumura
explained. "SOA makes decisions like this much more fluid."
Realizing Hidden Value
Cost savings can
be another result.
"One way of looking at it is a client/server architecture done
right," Abrams said. "It's primarily about saving money because it
lets you use the power of the software, services, platforms and integration
technologies that you purchased in the past five years or so -- power you're
not getting now because the technologies are not working well
together." Indeed, "it saves money over time
because you're no longer supporting individual silos,"
On a higher level, services can be managed as a portfolio, letting the
enterprise focus on those with the highest rewards, Matsumura added. "What
SOA can do is enable business users to understand not only what it is those
techie guys in IT are doing -- which is good -- but also, because of the
portfolio metaphor, it allows them to judge the relative merit of things and
helps them decide what to focus on."
'Simply Imperative'
Implementing SOA involves organizational changes on multiple levels, both
technological and cultural, and can take anywhere from six months to six years,
Matsumura said. However, the benefits are many.
"I think the really exciting factor about SOA is that it takes a bunch
of incomprehensible technologies and it makes them into a human endeavor,"
he concluded. "It takes something that was previously seen as messy and
technical and drives it into something that's seen as clean and
single-functional, almost like an appliance."
The result: "As IT people start to focus on business services, the
business people start to say, 'I didn't know we
could do that!'," Matsumura said. "A lot of the preexisting
capabilities become usable again and part of a bigger system."
In short, "the world is moving in this direction, whether you like it
or not,"