Service-Oriented Architecture is an IT strategy that organizes the discrete functions contained in enterprise applications into interoperable, standards-based services that can be combined and reused quickly to meet business needs.
By organizing enterprise IT around services instead of around applications, SOA provides key benefits:
• Improves productivity, agility and speed for both Business and IT
• Allows IT to deliver services faster and align closer with business
• Allows the business to respond quicker and deliver optimal user experience.
BEA’s Domain Model for SOA encapsulates these practices within six domains, each of which must be considered equally to provide a focused framework for a Service-Oriented Architecture.
The six domains, while distinct, are interrelated and interdependent. Executing on each domain with equal focus is fundamental to the success of an enterprise-wide SOA initiative.
The Six Domains—Responding to Challenges Each of the six domains addresses a challenge to successfully delivering a Service-Oriented Architecture.
1. Business Strategy and Process:
Challenge: Providing IT implementations that support the business and its changing needs.
Response: Provide an environment that links the management and measurement of IT with the business strategy and empowers both to work together for continual process improvement.
2. Architecture:
Challenge: Nearly all enterprises fund and build IT by projects in lines of business, leaving enterprise-wide
processes and integration to be considered as afterthoughts and creating barriers to change.
Response: An IT environment based on standards, distribution, loose coupling and business process representation that is designed to respond to change and integrate functionality at an enterprise level.
3. Building Blocks:
Challenge: Lack of consistency and repeatability in IT implementation hinders most enterprises in achieving their goals with respect to IT budgets and agility.
Response: A common, standards-based foundation on which to deliver IT provides a basis to achieve consistency and maximizes the ability to repeat successes through reuse of implementations and core infrastructure.
4. Projects and Applications:
Challenge: IT is traditionally developed by projects within lines of business creating situations where excessive capital is spent duplicating functionality and the integrity of enterprise processes is compromised.
Response: Catalog, categorize, and re-factor functionality offered by the systems and applications in the enterprise to standardize the manner in which that functionality is offered while driving out redundancy and promoting consistency in business execution.
5. Organization and Governance:
Challenge: The organic growth of enterprises through the creation of individual solutions for new requirements yields IT architectures that are difficult and costly to change.
Response: An organizational structure and mandate to govern and standardize the delivery of IT to assure IT business needs and maximizes the use of developed functionality.
6. Costs and Benefits:
Challenge: The cost of IT for the benefit received is a constant source of friction between IT organizations and the business they support.
Response: Plan and execute IT implementations to create early and sustainable value that leverages existing investments in IT while accommodating change and growth.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
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