Typical SOA Scenarios

Submitted by Ivo Totev. Business Analysts

A Service-Oriented Architecture, or SOA, is a highly promising concept for organizations today. It supports realization of their key business goals, such as improve customer service, cut costs and penetrate new markets. However before embarking on a SOA project, organizations need to define and plan their overall SOA direction, starting with these three questions:

What business challenges do you want your SOA to address?

How will you organize your SOA project and manage internal communications?

How do you plan to measure the success of your SOA efforts?

Experience has shown that SOA has been utilized very successfully for certain industry-specific scenarios; Public-sector entities, for instance, benefit from implementing SOA for e-government or identity management. SOAs improve the processes for citizen and government agency interactions. Furthermore, SOAs can ease and standardize complex data exchanges, for example traveler data between international border controls. In the financial sector organizations utilize SOA to optimize existing business processes and reduce error ratios through automation. Claims management and underwriting in the insurance industry or processing loan applications and payments in banking are just a few examples.

A study by Forrester Consulting noted that the European SOA project focus is still entirely on application integration. In contrast, American companies see SOA as a means for achieving strategic business goals. This trend will soon spread to Europe though, since European organizations also recognize that savvy use of cutting-edge IT leads to tangible advantages over the competition.

The following SOA project goals apply, regardless of the industry: optimization of business process management (BPM); improvement of information flow by integrating existing applications (legacy modernization); and increased user productivity through innovative user interfaces, reflecting the Web 2.0 approach (mash-up applications).

Never lose sight of the goal
When planning a SOA project, organizations should strive toward a smaller-scale, medium-term implementation. This enables project leaders to manage more effectively and produce results faster. A survey recently published by Evans Data supports this recommendation, concluding that the typical SOA project takes between just three and six months.

After completing a SOA project, companies should measure and assess the achieved business value. Most decisive are the direct project-related figures, such as Return on Investment (ROI) and number of new, reusable services created. Feedback from internal departments can also serve as a benchmark for success, for example, analyzing business transaction processing times or manufacturing error rates.

Managing a SOA
As SOA grows in importance to the organization, so do the security requirements preventing unauthorized information access. SOA security is critical to organizations that must comply with specific legal requirements or exchange sensitive data, as in the public sector.

Furthermore, as available services proliferate in organizations, the need for better governance increases significantly. Ideally, project leaders should implement SOA Governance right at the beginning of a project. In this way, they can efficiently manage and monitor service development. SOA Governance ensures that service development and use reflects the corporate strategy and defined SOA rules.