The neverending tussle between the technologists and the business team continues. And this time it’s around a new buzzword - SOA. While the technologists argue that SOA will bring down the OPEX/CAPEX and make business more agile; The business guys worry whether this is just another blah-blah, that will burn some more $$$ out of their IT budgets.
Here is how Business folks think…
My competition is launching a new product X in Christmas time. I need to have a differentiator to compete. No problem. I already have 3 products A, B and C. So if I pick up 3 features of product A, 2 from B and another three from C and bundle it together, I have a competing product which will better product X. Now here is the trick…I will launch it just before Christmas so that I can get all the attention in the market.
Here is how IT folks think…
I wish it was this simple. Product A, B and C are supported by different applications. When we designed these applications we never thought we would see this case. If we start building this I don’t think we will be ready before Christmas. I wish I had a way I could bundle and unbundle stuff quickly.
With due regards to the efforts put up by your IT team, SOA exactly lets you do this. SOA helps you build a “wear and tear” friendly architecture, that can respond to these needs of your business.
So here is the idea…
SOA tells you to build services out of applications. These services are designed to be platform agnostic and thus help you disconnect from details like OS, programming platform etc. So you don’t have to worry about whether your customer data is in out which CRM product. All you need to know is there is a service called getCustomerData that can help you query customer information. This is the input and output of the service. You can also bundle the services to represent a business functionality. In SOA world, we call it a business service. For example, A billing service could call getCustomerID and then get prepaid phone bill along with Internet usage from different services exposed out of separate billing applications. What you get is a consolidated bill for the customer “Bill Clinton”.
Good, now that you don’t have to worry about systems, you could focus more on building business processes that connect with these services, when they need to. Automate these processes to streamline your business. The hand off points are automated. People in your organization need to more worry about their workitems rather than who gives what information and where it goes to. Moreover, no redundant data entries.
Once you have automated your processes, how do you know what is happening to your business ? SOA advocates you to build a monitoring layer on top of processes that lets to have dashboards showing real time data on your KPIs (Key performance indicators).
Putting it all together…
So now, when you want to bundle new products. All you need to do is reuse and reconnect the existing services, build ones that you may not have today. Modify specific business process to accommodate the new product and you are done…ready to launch. Isn’t it making your IT work the way your business wants. This may sound far more simple than it is in actual. There are complexities involved and I would love to translate that to simple english too. However, for now I will save that for another post.