Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was one of the hottest topics in enterprise software in 2005, and it is set to continue to generate a huge amount of interest again in 2006 as more and more people look to it to help them deliver IT which is more responsive to the needs of business. However, although some industry analysts predict that SOA is soon to become a mainstream proposition, there’s still a lot of confusion and misunderstanding out there in industry about what SOA is, and why it’s important. SOA is a big and important idea, and I’m hoping that 2006 sees a bit more reflection on the topic. The more misunderstanding there is, the more opportunities will be missed, and the more challenges and risks will go unmanaged.

With this series of articles, I hope I can help clarify the opportunities and challenges that come with embarkation on a serious SOA initiative. In each article, I’ll be looking at how organisations can use SOA to drive more business value from the IT they use and the way they use it.

Understanding the “S” and the “A” of SOA

In order to kick things off, I want to start from first principles. But I won’t bore you with talk of SOAP, WSDL, UDDI or any one of a hundred other acronyms. Instead I want to concentrate on a broader perspective of what the “S” and the “A” in SOA mean. In my mind, both “service” and “architecture” have meaning far beyond the context within which most discussion of SOA is taking place.

At MWD, our view is that the idea of a “service” is something that is relevant not only to how you build, deploy and integrate application software – the “web services perspective”, if you like – it is an opportunity to capture and formalise the way in which IT in general is delivered. Why? Because the concept of a “service” in the context of IT is something with a long heritage, and there are many perspectives, all of which have value and all of which are going to remain in place, even when SOAP and WSDL are old hat. For example – in the world of systems management tools, there has long been talk of “service management”, which aims to aggregate and abstract operational system metrics to a level where they can be measured against high-level service level agreements (SLAs) defined for “business services”. In the world of IT helpdesk tools, vendors and customers talk of “service management” in terms of improving how IT problems are solved by support staff. In the world of systems integration and consulting, “IT services” describe things like software development, integration and IT maintenance activities that are carried out by engineers.