Service Oriented Architectures
Over the past year there has been acceleration in the level of interest in service-centric IT architectures, with IT service management (ITSM) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) attracting of lot of attention by CIO’s. In this article I’m going to explain what is driving this interest, what SOA actually is and why all organisations should have this front and centre in their IT strategies.
In today’s marketplace customers are demanding much higher levels of operational service across vastly extended longer service windows, and at a lower price points both from their internal IT departments and contracted suppliers! The old school tolerance acceptance levels for IT defects are also being re-shaped as companies demand systems that can self maintain and heal any defects without triggering alerts for human intervention ,
Service organisations and providers alike have to prove that they can deliver consistent levels of service, monitor against targets, identify potential issues, facilitate the management of complaints and comply with regulatory requirements. Key enablers are web technologies that shift the focus from application-centric to people-centric and, coupled with a number of recent technology disrupters, we are transitioning to IT as an on demand service.
This represents a significant challenge for IT departments still reeling from a recession and the associated change in attitudes to historical investment approaches but does align much more closely to IT in a service centric model. It’s no longer a case of spend in internal IT to differentiate your organisation but about how to realize the services needed to meet your tactical and strategic business objectives.
The challenge for both the forward thinking SI’s and their clients is that many organisations still have the bulk of their IT resources heavily committed to supporting existing legacy systems. Only a relatively small proportion of IT spend is actually available to help in any transformation work. The solution is to move the focus from the underlying technology to the processes needed to deliver their business.
Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Service Management help organisations to create reusable process assembles which are faster and more cost-effective to deploy and bring IT much closer to the line-of-business, perhaps actually working in close collaboration with key business users to shape services correctly to address requirements.
SOA is essentially about modularity. Like previous efforts in IT to build applications out of components or modules (e.g. OO), SOA development allows you to build complex applications by first breaking them down into their constituent parts. The ‘decomposed’ component requirements can be addressed through independent development activities and the resulting ‘services’ can be integrated to provide the required application.
The advantage of SOA is that it allows you to change a component without changing other components (loose coupling). This is delivered through the use of technical interface standards within SOA implementations. The use of these standards allows the program requesting the service and the program providing the service to be built without detailed interactions between the development teams about the detailed technical implementation.
The use of these interface standards is also part of the reason that SOA can deliver the ability to reuse components. If you build a service to a standard service interface definition, then multiple programs can more readily call that service again and again.
SOA reduces the amount of time, money and risk that is associated with the initial development of an application. And, because of the clean separation of services, the application logic and defined, standard interfaces that are built for each service reduces the time, money and risk associated with subsequent development.
These changes help businesses realize greater levels of agility to enter new markets and take on new capabilities faster than ever before. The role of the IT developer is re-focused on the integration of re-usable and loosely coupled applications in response to the requirements articulated by the business strategists.
Service Centric IT models are high on the agenda’s of all CIO’s and implementations are gathering pace but we are not yet at a significant tipping point for the mass market with Deloitte Consulting reporting only 10% of enterprises surveyed had taken the plunge. The challenge is in the chasm between high levels of investment in platform centric services and a move to a Service Centric strategy. There is a clear need for transformation roadmaps to help organisations extract the maximal ROI from their existing legacy spending and to start to put in place the necessary foundations changes for a move to these highly agile and cost-effective service centric models.
anthonykking
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