IT Articles : an opinion in SOA
IT Articles : an opinion in SOA
There have been recent conversations whether a Service Oriented Architecture ( SOA) could replace an IT department of an organization. The answer is no. It is common to put SOA governance and IT in the same basket but the two don’t have that much in common.
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SOA is an architectural style with a goal to achieve loose coupling among interacting software agents, helping to manage business services, whereas IT governance is focused on managing technology.
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For example, SOA is like owning a burger franchise that is also like the other burger franchises, anyone can go to the different burger places and expect to get the same thing, but at different locations. Everything is great as long as the service is running smooth. If there is a bump in the road, say the burger recipe for all of the stores went missing, they would need to call in an expert, (IT help) to find a solution. Once the recipe was found, (the bug fixed by the IT person), the SOA system would then continue to run fine, but IT is an essential part of the SOA ebb and flow. Granted, imagine if an IT person was the only one who manually made sure that each transaction within each burger franchise went smoothly? It would be a burger franchise disaster. Therefore, a service oriented architecture helps keep all burger franchise systems working smoothly with an IT person on call. Can businesses save money by purchasing an SOA system in conjunction with their current system?
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Businesses can save money with an SOA system and scale down their current IT department but not remove the IT department all together. In fact, business processes are only streamlined by having the two together. According to a recent report, in 2007, companies spent $1.4 million on SOA. The report found in a survey among IT executives from China, US and Germany that 22% claimed faster speed and less risk was the main reason to get an SOA , 18% claimed reduce IT costs and %17 claimed reuse. An SOA provides all of these things and more. You could say that an SOA is enterprise governance only, not governance over IT. With the two together, businesses are finding so many ways to reorganize, restructure and reuse their current database and in turn create profits.
