Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) – Debunked, Demystified and Decomposed

November 21, 2008

Having ran an organization called SOA-iT (Services Oriented Architecture-information Technology) as VP of Business Development and subsequently as its President and CEO, I am often asked by CEOs and other senior business management what is SOA and what would it do for me.

A fair question. Let me once and for all lift the mystery. Imagine if you could ask your CIO and Functional heads (COO, CMO, CStraO, CFO, CHRO, Head of Procurement and Supply Chain) any business question and have them respond immediately with valid data pulled real-time from their computer’s personal dashboard. Imagine a world where the IT and functional systems within your organization supported your business decisions as oppose to dictated your business processes around their limitations or technical nuances. Put simply, business decisions on-demand. And, doesn’t that sound like the world we all, as business executives operate in: on-demand consumer and customer needs, instant-by-instant shifts in the competitive landscape requiring instant corresponding change in your strategic and operating posture, on-demand discounting, pricing and inventory adjustments. On-demand, on-demand, and more on-demand.

On another front, increasing need for transnational operations, virtual and globally dispersed supply and production chains and the shear need for M&A (to buy talent or to gain route-to-market or to consolidate a sector or to take out a competitor) makes it not only “critical” to have on-demand market, competitor and synthesized business intelligence (BI) from all your enterprise functional systems and voice-of-customer BI to support your business decisions but makes it is simply imperative.

So why is it that we can not make this come to fruition in an on-demand fashion? Simple. It is your sophisticated but inflexible IT and functional systems that are in silos with their own intelligence repositories providing no integrated view of your enterprise data. The data hence has to be pulled separately, parsed, synthesized, analyzed and next disseminated. That cycle of information management takes too long in today’s competitive environment. The often heard comments from the CEO is “My competitive landscape is not slowing, my competitors are becoming more elusive and un-distinguishable and my customers want a say in product and service design, its pricing and my distribution means of those goods and I need to respond to that NOW!”. The germane question, and the often posed question, by the CEOs and executives is then what can I do about it?

Enter the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Although your CIO will seek my head for over-simplifying this, it is that simple. SOA allows you to decouple your IT infrastructure (Hardware, software, applications, data repositories, OS, etc.) from the data and intelligence you need to informationalize your business processes and have on-demand data, and more importantly, intelligence to support your business decisions. Several proven off-the-shelf SOA code / software layer platforms exists in the market today from IBM, Microsoft and Tibco as well as a whole array of other reliable providers. The main challenge is devising the data architecture and the re-usable information repositories to gain what is known as a “Web Services” state, what we would call a state of “on-demand intelligence” available in form of personalized C-Level dashboards.

Also, today another technology called Desktop Virtualization (DV) is making possible the creation of Web Service and a de-facto SOA architecture via application, data virtualization and use of policy engines for role and rule based access control to create ad-hoc communities of interest (COI) and Web Services repositories and even business rules for external or internal access to these Web services and business intelligence (BI) repositories.

So do not hesitate. Deploy SOA and gain process visibility, an on-demand state to support business decisions, the ability to move your posture according to your markets and competitors’ dictates, and more importantly, respond to the voice of your ever-demanding customers. And, when it comes to the woes of integration after an M&A, rest assured that information from the acquired entities can readily be rationalized and integrated and made available. But have a very good change management program to align the human resources.