SOA: Think Business Transformation, Not Code Reuse

CIO - The worst CIO misunderstanding about service-oriented architecture (SOA) is thinking of it as only another technical initiative for software reuse. Although SOA's reuse potential is real and good, its business impact goes much further: In Forrester surveys, 38 percent of Global 2000 SOA users say they are using it for strategic business transformation. SOA's true source of power is in its business design models, not its technology - and this means that SOA provides a broad foundation for a much larger shift in business technology (BT) architecture that goes far beyond SOA itself. By correctly understanding SOA, CIOs can lead their organizations on a solid and well-managed path toward a strategic technology future and greater business value.

[CIO.com's resident expert Dan Rosanova dives deep and provides expert advice and analysis about SOA in his blog SOA Advisor]

Forrester defines SOA as a business-focused approach to solution design and software architecture. By providing open, flexible access to the business capabilities and transactions buried within an organization's applications, SOA makes it easier to adapt existing software to new business requirements. CIOs who think of SOA merely from a technology perspective will miss this business view of SOA, and they'll miss an opportunity to lead their organizations forward. SOA is the foundation of a much broader shift in the future of business-focused IT architecture, which means that those who get SOA wrong will have a poor business foundation for many years to come.

Sixty-eight percent of enterprises say they are using SOA or will be using it by the end of 2010. Fifty-six percent are using SOA now, and that number jumps to 74 percent when considering only Global 2000 organizations. All this SOA usage is not just industry hype and experimentation, either. SOA has been delivering tangible results that make IT executives want more of it: 52 percent of current enterprise SOA users say it has delivered enough benefit that they plan to expand its use, while only 1 percent of SOA users say they are cutting back on SOA because they see little or no benefit. For the rest, it's either too early to tell or they are struggling to get the benefits - often because they approach it as only a technology.

SOA Definition and Solutions

The key points CIOs must understand about SOA are:

• SOA aligns your software with your business. While it is true that SOA is fundamentally an approach to software architecture and design, which makes it sound tech-oriented, the most important SOA concept is to design software around the business capabilities you need to run your organization. Each SOA-based business service performs a complete business unit of work, hiding the complexity of your IT applications behind a pluggable digital software interface for a specific, targeted business capability such as "submit order" or "distribute sales lead."