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Adopting Service Oriented Architecture increases the flexibility of your enterprise
Service Oriented Architecture is also known as :
SOA Collaboration,
SOA Governance,
SOA Concepts,
SOA Implementation,
SOA Principles,
Enterprise Soa,
SOA Services,
SOA Systems,
Service Architecture,
SOA Suite,
SOA Integration,
SOA Strategy,
SOA Concepts,
Service-Oriented Analysis And Design,
Service Component Architecture,
Resource Oriented Architecture,
Event-Driven SOA,
Component Business Model
' Shireesh Jayashetty, Pradeep Kumar M
Introduction
Information Technology (IT) systems lasted longer earlier. Organization
re-structuring was uncommon as business did not demand it. With
ever-shrinking business cycles, IT must quickly adapt to changing business
needs. Present day IT systems must be built to change. Organizational
structure and culture now must reflect this change for efficiency. The
modern day enterprise demands that its resources ' technology, people and
processes ' should be plug-and-play ready, to help it become a flexible
enterprise.
In this paper, we discuss how Service Oriented Architecture
(SOA) enables flexibility in the enterprise. Flexibility leads to quicker
adoption of business opportunities and thus, an increase in revenues.
Drivers
SOA brings a paradigm change in the organization structure and
culture. Enterprises must adopt new trends in IT to accomplish their business
objectives. For this, the IT effectiveness of any organization must be
measured to help them achieve excellence in several objectives including:
a) Business Drivers
New opportunities:
- Innovative products and services
form the key differentiator to gain competitive edge
- Ability to leverage
technology to adopt newer business models, thus enabling more channels to
earn revenue
Cost Savings:
- Cost reduction through reduced Total Cost of
Ownership (TCO) adds to the bottom-line. For instance, a Healthcare major was
able to save over US$ 12 million in a year, by adopting SOA to achieve a
higher degree of automation in claims adjudication process
Business
Agility:
- With cut-throat competition, every missed business opportunity
positions an enterprise below its competitors. The ability of an enterprise
to quickly respond to various business stimuli will be key to survival
- Faster time to market increases customer satisfaction and also customer loyalty.
This results in increased business and higher revenues. For instance, a
Healthcare major was able to reduce time to market for new product launch
from 12 months to 3 months by adopting SOA.
- Ability to provide on
demand service, in real-time, 24/7 iv. Seamless collaboration with partners
and customers helps to improve service quality and time to market
b)
Technology Drivers
To achieve business goals, it is imperative to adopt an IT
strategy that has openness and agility as intrinsic properties and results in
cost savings:
Openness
- Dependency on technology and platform vendors is
an external risk to an organization on which it has little control. However,
adopting open standards mitigates this risk
Cost Saving
- Reduction in
maintenance cost / TCO
- Increased reuse of investment in IT leads to
increased revenue productivity resulting in increased ROI
Agility
- Loose coupling increases application agility and reduces time to market for a
new application
- Seamless scalability at minimal cost to cater to
seasonal increase in load
SOA Defined
SOA helps enterprises meet all these
business and technology drivers. SOA refers to an architectural strategy to
help achieve business-IT alignment, by adopting a three-dimensional
perspective of the enterprise namely, technology, people and processes (Figure
1). SOA facilitates implementation of business functionality as a set of
well-governed, standards-based, loosely-coupled services and processes,
defined in a flexible and agile manner. SOA is an architectural strategy that
helps achieve tighter Business-IT alignment by taking a three dimensional
perspective of the enterprise, viz. technology, people and processes. The key
aspect of SOA is to make business functionality available as a set of well
governed, standards-based, loosely coupled services and processes, defined in
a flexible and agile manner.
SOA is an architectural strategy that helps achieve tighter Business-IT
alignment by taking a three dimensional perspective of the enterprise, viz.
technology, people and processes. The key aspect of SOA is to make business
functionality available as a set of well governed, standards-based, loosely
coupled services and processes, defined in a flexible and agile manner.
Figure 1: SOA encompasses organizing and
managing technology, people and processes (Source: Infosys research)
Service orientation involves re-structuring the organization (people and
process) to align with this new paradigm designed to deliver effective and
efficient services to end-customers.
To leverage technology capability
through service orientation, it is a must to re-align business units,
business-enabling units and sub-units within the organization. Bringing a
centralized department, for instance, into the fold of another department to
streamline processes or outsourcing to a unit as the external integration is
being made simpler.
This also involves defining new organization processes,
service providers and consumers both internally and externally. A new
governance structure to manage and align the customers, business users and
the IT staff to this structure is also imperative.
a) SOA: Technology
SOA
specifies a set of principles and techniques to encourage encapsulation and
modeling of reusable functions and processes. It essentially abstracts the
actual underlying technology from the business services. This allows for the
technology to change without affecting the business continuity. This also
helps organizations to reuse their existing IT assets in terms of shared
services (both infrastructure and business services).
b) SOA: People
Efficient human resources enhance the IT effectiveness of an organization and
increases competitiveness. However, SOA adoption brings a paradigm change in
the organizations structure and culture. Service orientation forces
organizations to realign their structure based on information ownership,
business process ownership, governance roles, service providers and service
consumers. This aids in optimal utilization of employees
People include
business users, IT staff and customers. In a service-oriented enterprise, IT
staff can assume the role of service vendors. Business users can become service
providers while end customers become service consumers.
c) SOA: Processes
In SOA, a business process refers to a systematic composition of context-free
business services into a logical unit in a given business context, to achieve
a complex business goal. SOA helps seamless information sharing across
enterprises with implications on business process execution. Most human
interventions in business processes can be potentially automated, resulting
in greater efficiency. Workarounds in business processes used earlier to fill
gaps due to technological limitations can be completely eliminated. Most
airlines, for instance, now provide e-ticketing and allow their passengers to
print boarding passes at home. This benefits both the airlines and the
passengers. Airlines save staff cost and stationery cost; passengers get
flexibility and better customer service.
Business Process Modeling (BPM) is a
technique in which the business solutions are defined as a set of reusable,
dynamically alterable business processes connecting services (or software
components) and human interactions. The business process defines the sequence
of flow, how external events must be handled, human interaction requirements
and conditional processing.
SOA Governance
SOA governance is related to
Enterprise Architecture (EA) governance. SOA governance is a set of
mechanisms through which SOA is adopted in the enterprise. It is an integrated
set of dimensions that provides the mechanism for defining, implementing,
managing and measuring the effectiveness of SOA in the enterprise.
SOA
governance taps into an enterprise's technology and business processes to
provide direction and control, ensuring that the expected value of its
investment in IT is realized. It also addresses external influences such as
global business drivers, industry trends and the corporate strategy, along
with technology trends and opportunities.
- Leadership: Executive
sponsorship provides access to an audience with the decision-making power to
influence implementation of architectural guidelines. Making this select
group understand and influence the SOA roadmap definition will not only bring in
the organization's experience, but also foster adoption.
- Organization:
SOA governance team's responsibilities cover a broad range of business,
technical and managerial activities such as:
- Understanding business
strategies
- Envisioning, leading and guiding the development of the SOA
- Technology incubation, product evaluation and recommendation
- Management of
exceptions
The SOA governance team has a two-tier structure with a core
governance team and an extended governance team. The extended governance team
also includes vendor partners.
- Investment: This includes investment and
funding models that drive the adoption and proliferation of SOA architecture
principles and design practices. SOA requires a different investment and
funding model from the traditional EA. An SOA investment and funding model
must be addressed from the following perspective:
- Development of
enterprise-wide artifacts such as standards, guidelines, policies and
processes
- Assessment and compliance activities
- Shared business service
development and provisioning
Development of enterprise wide artifacts and
ensuring compliance is handled by the centralized SOA governance team, hence
it requires executive sponsorship. Shared business service development and
provisioning is usually handled by respective business units that own the
business functionality. Hence, this requires a distributed funding model. One
of the primitive models for funding such shared services is pay-per-use or
charge-back. However, this model may not have universal acceptance. Organization
restructuring to reflect the end-user segmentation based on the services they
use, could address this issue.
- Processes: Processes define how
architecture content is planned, developed, ratified and communicated,
maintained and complied with by projects. SOA governance processes manage
technology that aligns it with the business goals, adopted in the IT Strategy.
These processes enable the architecture team to integrate with other
enterprise processes such as project funding and portfolio management to
enable effective decision-making.
- Policies and Principles: The policies
and principles define guidelines for decision-making on architecture
development, implementation and management, to ensure transparency and
objectivity. Governance principles address interaction between architecture and
the organization it is embedded into. Policies reflect an organizational
decision about architecture governance. Well-defined principles and policies
for architectural arbitration and decision making improve acceptance of
results and reduce decision-making time.
- Measurements: Metrics help not
only in quantifying business benefits of SOA but also help in continuous
improvement to achieve higher business agility. Hence, appropriate metrics should be defined and tracked for all three dimensions of SOA ' people,
processes and technology. o Metrics for people: Activity-oriented metrics,
tracking the performance of the group
- Metrics for processes: Reduction in
process completion time, percentage automation
- Metrics for technology:
Availability of services, adherence to service level agreements, reduction in
maintenance cost, turn around time for new / improved business processes
- Tools: SOA is an architectural style that manages people, processes and
technology. Tools play a significant role in an SOA process. SOA tools
include:
- Tools for SOA definition: Tools that create, manage and organize
enterprise-wide artifacts such as policies, standards, guidelines, models
- Tools for SOA analysis: Tools that help perform as-is analysis, business
process analysis
- Tools for SOA infrastructure: Tools that provide a
runtime environment for SOA. This includes tools to monitor and manage shared
services for instance, enterprise service bus, business process execution
engine, etc.
Approach
Enterprise architecture (EA) is the practice of
applying a comprehensive and rigorous method to describe a structure for an
organization's process, information systems, personnel and organizational
sub-units, to align them with the organization's core goals and strategic
direction EA must adopt SOA as the architectural style for the organization
to meet its stated goals and benefits.
An organization embarking on a
large business transformation initiative should have clarity on the purpose
and means of achieving it. An un-initiated organization should build a business
case, identity their key pain points, document business goals and articulate
business vision. These artifacts provide clarity on who are the key
stakeholders and why they have to undergo the transformation. Analysis of
as-is business processes, governance processes and the application portfolio
are critical inputs in defining a roadmap. Service orientation is a slow and
gradual process. Hence, stake holders should have a clear understanding on
where they stand in the SOA ladder (see SOA Evolution model) and where they
want to go.
Figure 3 depicts a four-phased approach to SOA led business
transformation. The envision phase addresses the "why, when and who",
elaborate phase addresses "what and where", execute phase addresses "how".
SOA Evolution Model
Businesses use IT, both as a strategic change agent
(for competitive differentiation) as well as a tactical change agent (for
operational effectiveness) leading to business transformation. Service
Oriented Architecture fuels this transformation when used in the right context.
Such a transformation is an evolutionary process that includes the harnessing
of technology, processes and people. This evolution is captured in the form
of a road map comprising a five-stage process (Figure 4) depicted in the SOA
evolution model.
Not every enterprise must aim to adopt SOA at the highest
level. Each enterprise has unique business objectives and hence this decision
should be taken based on the factors such as:
- The vision
- The
business goals and objectives
- The industry domain in which they operate
- The size of the enterprise
- The competition
- The budgetary
constraints
Benefits of SOA
SOA is the IT strategy to be considered to
transform an enterprise to a flexible enterprise. It addresses all aspects of
IRACIS2 ' Improve Revenue, Avoid Cost and Improve Service.
Improve Revenue:
Due to improved business agility, it is possible to improve revenue by
adopting newer business models, offering innovative and timely products and
services.
Avoid Cost: By isolating the implementation aspects from the
service consumers, SOA enables harvesting existing business knowledge form
legacy systems (through legacy modernization). Also, by providing a platform
of "Shared Services" SOA helps re-usability at the macro level. This reduces
the recurring operational cost. SOA also eliminates unnecessary duplication of
systems, applications and storage, thereby, reducing the maintenance cost
significantly.
Improve Service: The composition of services (through BPM)
is a powerful technique to define and deploy a new product (a logical
application unit) which gives rise to a concept of "pluggable business". This
reduces the "time-to-market" quantum thus helping gain competitive edge.
Conclusion
Enterprise transformation into service orientation is a gradual
process and requires careful and controlled adoption. Most often such an
exercise is looked upon as an IT transformation initiative rather than a
business transformation initiative. This is because the business sponsors do not
see a direct benefit of the investment until SOA stabilizes. Though solving
integration issues seems to be the obvious and biggest advantage of service
orientation, the real value for money is in the business agility achieved
through it.
Adopting SOA provides enterprises several advantages. However, it
does not solve all problems. It is important to understand the limitations of
SOA and plan its adoption with these limitations that include:
- Mindless
service orientation leads to over engineering
- Arriving at the right level
of service granularity is very important. Too much granularity leads to
"Service Hell" situation which leads to increased maintenance costs.
Similarly, too less granularity limits re-use and becomes progressively
inflexible
- Service orientation without proper governance processes in place
will lead to a chaotic mesh of IT assets
- Enforcing adherence to the
defined governance processes is a challenge. If not done efficiently, there
is a risk of SOA not yielding the promised benefits
- Arriving at a consensus
on financial models for revenue and cost sharing is a challenge
Abbreviations used in this Document
|
|
Acronym |
Description |
| 1 |
BPM |
Business
Process Management / Modeling |
| 2 |
EA |
Enterprise Architecture |
| 3 |
IRACIS |
Improve Revenue, Avoid Cost, Improve Service |
| 4 |
IT |
Information Technology |
| 5 |
LOB |
Line of Business |
| 6 |
ROI |
Return on Investment |
| 7 |
SOA |
Service(s) Oriented
Architecture |
| 8 |
TCO |
Total Cost of Ownership |
About the Authors:
Shireesh
Jayashetty: Shireesh is a Principal Architect with Infosys Technologies Limited.
He has vast experience in architecting large scale distributed systems for
several Fortune 500 clients. His areas of interest are Service Oriented
Architecture and Legacy Modernization
Pradeep Kumar M: Pradeep is a Senior
Architect with Infosys Technologies Limited. He has vast experience of
working on several large SOA engagements.