Where should businesses start with SOA? In partnership with Mercer Management Consulting, IBM has studied emerging practices among its own 1,900 SOA clients. This research has illuminated three core business-centric SOA starting points, people, processes and information, and two IT-centric starting points, connectivity and reuse.
Through business-centric SOA, companies can tie IT projects to the business need, directly addressing the firm's immediate pain points.
People: productivity though people collaboration
Improve people productivity by aggregating views that deliver information and interaction in the context of a business process. This enables human and process interaction with consistent levels of service.
Start by building a view of a key business process by aggregating information to help people make better decisions. Next steps: tighter management of performance with alert-driven dashboards that link to more processes.
Process: business process management for continuous innovation
Deploy innovative business models quickly with re-usable and optimized processes, adapting the enterprise to changing opportunities and threats.
Start by modeling an underperforming process, remove bottlenecks, then simulate and deploy the optimized process. Next steps: create flexible linkages between multiple processes across the enterprise and outside the firewall to suppliers and partners. Then, monitor the process to measure and track performance.
Information: delivering information as a service
Improve business insight and reduce risk with trusted information services delivered in-line and in-context.
Start by discovering and understanding information sources, relationships and the business context. Next steps: expand the volume and scope of the information delivered as a service across internal and external processes.
Individually, each approach has the potential to deliver strong returns on investment. In combination, the potential for SOA to transform business performance rises sharply. IBM calls this the multiplier effect.
Two IT-centric starting points help the enterprise integrate business-centric SOA and to build and reuse SOA services effectively.
Connectivity: underlying connectivity to support business-centric SOA
Connectivity has always been a requirement. But SOA brings new levels of flexibility. As well as acting as a building block for additional SOA initiatives, connectivity provided through SOA has distinct, standalone value.
Reuse: creating flexible, service-based business applications
Cut costs, reduce cycle times and expand access to core applications through reuse. Analysts estimate it is up to five times less expensive to re-use existing applications than to write new applications.
Use portfolio management to consider which assets you need to run your company. Identify high-value existing IT assets and service-enable them for reuse. Satisfy remaining business needs by creating new services. Finally, create a registry/repository to provide centralized access to and control of these reusable services.
Key to successful SOA is SOA Governance. SOA Governance is a business-driven approach to making better IT decisions. IBM's Business Centric SOA equips clients with the resources they need. IBM provides complete end-to-end solutions through leading methodologies, technologies and services to automate SOA governance.
Which entry point makes sense for you?
There is no single answer: it depends on your business priorities. Taking a business-centric approach to SOA ensures that IT investments remain focused on areas that will mean the most for the bottom line. Talk to your IBM representative about your business goals, take a self assessment, visit www.ibm.com/soa or contact IBM directly at soa@us.ibm.com. IBM can help you lay out an approach that's right for you and help architect a project to help you reach that goal. Let's get started today!
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