While we’ve been hearing about the benefits of reuse, productivity and cost savings that are derived from a service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy, another area to consider is SOA’s ability to help close communication gaps in an organization. Whether your company is small and you must monitor all activities or it’s large and all the business processes are in lock step, you are still inevitably facing communication gaps that can impact your bottom line on a daily basis.
These gaps span both the business and IT aspects of an organization and make themselves most noticeable during times of change, such as a merger, the introduction of a new enterprise application or the continued reliance on a patched or broken process. The result is a communications breakdown that creates pain points for teams, departments, divisions, customers and partners.
SOA can help proactively address gaps so that time and resources don’t fall between the cracks. To fully understand the value that SOA can deliver for bridging those gaps, take a closer look at the challenges hindering the adoption of SOA.
The first challenge is the lack of a clear understanding of what SOA means and what it can do for the organization. The second is the cost justification, especially as budgets get tighter in this contracting economy. The third factor arises from the lack of skilled architects and developers who are fluent in SOA.
What SOA Means
There have been many healthy discussions about the true definition of SOA, but the industry still struggles to agree on a clear, concise and consistent definition. Essentially, SOA enables a company to align technology with its business goals. SOA is not new. It is an evolution in technology sparked by the growing demand to eliminate the silos that existed primarily as a result of the proliferation of proprietary applications. In the mid 90s, interest in enterprise application integration (EAI) surged as companies realized that the ability to take fully advantage of business opportunities afforded by the Web were only possible when the information trapped in silos was shared.
A true SOA infrastructure goes beyond enterprise applications. Through a standards-based architecture, SOA allows companies to harvest information and deliver it to the right person at the right time so they can make critical business decisions without having to be tethered to a specific platform, application or other constraint defined by the infrastructure.
While experts discuss and debate the right words to insert alongside the dictionary definition of SOA, perhaps it’s best to illustrate what SOA does in order to define its importance to an organization.
SOA Links Data
For example, consider the case study of an electric cooperative. Like most utilities over the years, it has added various propriety, homegrown and legacy applications to manage its call centers, dispatching of road crews, town maps, power line locations and other operations.
Before the SOA era, these disparate sources of information could not easily “talk” to one another without a lengthy and expensive integration project. Today, through an SOA infrastructure, the electric cooperative can simply accommodate an onslaught of customer calls, even during a major storm. SOA enables the cooperative to equip the call center with mapping data and make the information available to road crews that can quickly and efficiently identify the most urgent areas. In some instances, this includes the immediate dispatch of a crew to fix a downed power line strewn across a busy intersection.
SOA for Compliance
One of the buzzwords in health care these days is compliance. Hospitals, municipal agencies and medical practice groups all face regulations such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
