The Business Value of SOA
Having heard about SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) for a long time without having any idea what it is, I was happy to discover this talk by Anne Thomas Manes which finally sheds light on the subject for me.
Key points for me:
- SOA aims to tackle the problem of too much cost and redundancy in enterprise IT
- If you develop a capability, it should be reusable across your applications
- You want to avoid building monolithic applications
- SOA is something you do not something you buy
- Having an Enterprise Service Bus does not mean you have SOA
- SOA requires an organizational lifestyle change; You have to apply the principles across all the projects in the organization
- SOA is a long-term proposition, on the order of 10 or 20 years
Those last two sort-of make my eyes bug out. Do you know anyone in technology that makes 20-year plans? My feeling is that our organizational hierarchies simply prohibit cross-cutting changes like this in the enterprise. Either the CEO is demanding this from every division, or it won’t go forward.
I do think the principles are interesting. IT is such a young industry that we are learning for the first time what it looks like to have 40 years of cruft in your infrastructure. Certainly anything that begins to scrape away the barnacles should be good for the organization.
I liked this as well. She does a great job of pointing our that this is not about the “one technology to rule them all”. The most important lesson that was my take away was more about reducing redundancy and less about one-size-fits-all technology that is jammed down IT folks throats. She says that SOA is not just getting everyone to use one single Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).
Looked at through the lens she presents – it is easier to see where my organization (UM) is already doing some things using an SOA approach – things like UMIAC (our course information service) and our Cosign single sign on are the best example of real SOA as described by Anne.
The neat bit is that if you decide that reducing redundancy is the goal – then you can use whatever technology works at the moment – and deploy real and effective SOA solutions that really work and ultimately do improve function and saves money.
More insights from Anne Thomas Manes and Burton Group’s Application Platform Strategies team can be found in our free research section and blog.