SOA Business Value

How can organizations ensure SOA business value? This is a critical question because, according to IDC research, executives want IT to provide more high-business value services. Here's a closer look at some recommendations on how to do this throughout the SOA lifecycle.

Designing in SOA Business Value—by Focusing on the Business

To receive full SOA business value, rather than thinking of an SOA from a technical orientation, you should start by targeting the right business applications and use cases.

The reason is that service-oriented architecture can help address specific business needs in ways that other architecture cannot because it is about levels of abstraction. In an SOA, services represent business elements and functions. They are autonomous and multi-use, not hardwired, so can be used as needed in different business processes to which technologies and systems are applied. Where they are provisioned is less important than how they will be used.

Consequently, in planning an SOA, it's important to create models that represent how the different elements of the system relate to each other and to include standards for interoperability and semantic integration. In short, an SOA needs to be built on architectural tenets, schemas, contracts between service consumers and providers, and standards.

Once the business functions are standards-based and can take advantage of messaging and other SOA infrastructure, an event-based environment with dynamic levels of processing can evolve. In this kind of environment, triggers set off various business process scenarios and engage specific participants, so that technology supports, rather than dictates, business operations.

Ensuring SOA Business Value: Visibility into Runtime Operations

However, as an SOA evolves and its complexity grows, there is a need for holistic visibility and oversight. Everyone within the environment needs to understand the rules of engagement. In addition, proper policies need to be adopted, configured, and enforced.

While concern for these SOA governance issues has been associated with the SOA design in the past, the same concern needs to be extended to the SOA runtime environment. Runtime governance is important to ensure that services operate as planned and support service-level agreements—as well as to effect improvement.

The idea here is to create a feedback loop for the continual transformation of business processes and the SOA—to improve business outcomes. There should be an ongoing cycle in which measurement instigates changes to better support or improve the business.

However, one problem remains: getting insight into SOA operations from a business perspective.

An Obstacle to SOA Business Value: Understanding Operations in a Business Context

According to IDC's Services and Software Leading Indicators (2007), one of the main factors that impede organization effectiveness is the inability to measure the effectiveness of business processes and IT systems. This problem is relevant to ensuring SOA business value. To achieve SOA business value requires understanding IT performance in a business context—i.e., how the infrastructure is serving business processes. This information is necessary to adjust the SOA to directly serve business goals.

Yet most IT management tools today are used after end users report actual problems. Organizations have no way to see and manage their SOA in synch with business objectives or to resolve issues before they affect service delivery to key customers.

Progress Actional: Providing Business Insight for Optimizing SOA Business Value

Progress® Actional® for Continuous Service Optimization (CSO) provides business process visibility. It relates end-to-end business process execution to underlying IT activity—delivering business metrics related to runtime operations, such as order-to-fulfillment times, for viewing and rich analytics on a differentiated basis: by individual customer, customer groups, regions, etc., including custom-defined metrics. In addition, management dashboards offer historical data on SOA usage.

Actional for CSO provides business and IT metrics and relates them to underlying IT topology, improving SOA business value.

For More Information on Getting Full SOA Business Value

Download the Progress and IDC Webinar, "Continuous Service Optimization: How to Use SOA to Better Serve Your Business Goals" to learn how to develop and evolve an SOA that aligns with business goals and helps optimize business outcomes.