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SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE SOAs can provide a credible way to relate the productivity of systems in their IT context to their ultimate value in the business world
Opinion
In talking about the benefits that a service oriented architecture (SOA) can bring to an organisation, most people concentrate on two things: the ability to develop more flexible systems from collections of loosely coupled services and the ability to develop new systems more cheaply, quickly and at higher quality through the use of shared services.
These are both sound reasons to think about pursuing an SOA initiative. But is there more to the potential value of SOA than this?
From talking to leading-edge companies which have made serious commitments to SOA, I have come to the conclusion that the answer to this is a resounding "yes". SOA, done right, can show the way for IT organisations to clearly demonstrate the value they provide to their customers - that is, the businesses they work within.
But before SOA can raise the visibility of an IT organisation's value, we have to use SOA to help create a common language between IT and the business - in other words, to enhance mutual comprehensibility.
Luckily, many IT organisations will be pushing at an open door here. Increasingly organisations pushing for new business efficiencies and innovations are looking beyond the work done in individual departments to the work that gets done in end-to-end processes that span departments (such as "order-to-cash") and organisational boundaries.
Fundamentally this exercise (which is targeted by business process management initiatives) is about looking at what the organisation does from the perspective of customers, partners and suppliers - from the outside looking in, rather than...