Despite the widespread hype and reams of articles in technical and business journals alike, one question that still causes consternation amongst customers and practitioners alike is, “What is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)”? If compiled, the answers to this question would fill copious volumes, but a consensus on an answer would be elusive. The reason the answer to this question doesn’t fit into the mold of a precise technical definition is due to the fact that SOA is mostly a business concept, hence it has to be defined in a business context.
February 10, 2009
Sumeet Vij
Business Architecture (BA)
Business Process Management (BPM)
Articles by: Sumeet Vij
Modeling a Net-Centric Department of Defense (DoD) Enterprise using BPMN 2.0
If a picture is a worth a thousand words, a standardized model is definitely worth multiple pages of a requirement specification. Business and IT have long used tabular descriptions, flowcharts and other means to capture and describe how their business processes are run, but if a modeling format has to go beyond being just a sketch, it requires a standardized, non-proprietary notation which can be uniformly understood by all.
Being Intelligent with SOA: Using SOA to Lay the Foundation of your Business Intelligence (BI) Initiatives
SOA purists might scoff at using SOA for integration [1], but for many enterprises, Service Oriented Integration (SOI) remains one of the prime motivations for embarking on the SOA journey. Agreed SOI by itself doesn’t achieve the avowed goals of agility or elimination of redundant IT infrastructure, but it helps the enterprise address real concerns, now. The SOA Manifesto [2] states that Business value is of higher priority over technical strategy; hence easier integration with SOA is a valid goal of a SOA initiative.