Why SOA? What are the Overall Goals of the SOA Initiative?

With so many companies using SOA technologies, one must stop and pause and ask ourselves: why SOA? It is important that you clearly understand and can articulate your organization's unique goals that will drive the move to an enterprise-wide SOA. Every enterprise SOA will be driven by unique business and technical goals – as well as by short-term and long-term goals. Understanding these up front will help you choose the right projects and help ensure the success of early implementations.

Critical SOA questions to answer include:

• What are your primary reasons for using SOA? (To reduce costs? Achieve better flexibility? Enable faster deployment? Improve customer satisfaction?)
• What is driving your near-term use of SOA? (Connecting your core applications? Integrating with your partners? Providing a single view for customers and/or users? Getting real time business metric? Regulatory Compliance?)
• What is the long-term potential for SOA in your organization? (Faster product introductions?
• Flexible outsourcing? Business process flexibility? Stricter Web services governance? Other?)

The following benefits explain why SOA is so widely used in the enterprise: Operational Efficiencies

• Reducing infrastructure and management costs
• Improving end-to-end business process visibility, security, and/or control
• Streamlining root cause analysis and automating triage

Business Efficiencies

• Accelerating time-to-market of critical business applications and processes
• Enabling easier compliance with policies (security policies, business policies, regulatory policies) from all functional areas
• Maintaining business continuity across the enterprise through real-time response to security, performance or availability breaches
• Seeing business metrics in real time

Development Efficiencies

• Increasing service reuse and reducing development costs
• Reducing time to deployment of new services

Integration Efficiencies

• Reducing integration cost and complexity through the use of industry standards
• Seamlessly interoperating with, and leveraging the capabilities of, key third-party infrastructure solutions such as identity management systems, directory services, enterprise management systems

By documenting precise goals for an enterprise SOA, teams involved in the initiative can more effectively choose the right projects, manage the projects (e.g., avoid "scope creep"), make sure the overall results are not derailed and manage the expectations of surrounding stakeholders.

For More Information

Why SOA? Because it will save your business time and money. Get the facts: read the free white paper, Aligning IT and Business Goals with Business Process Visibility