subject: Business Benefits from SOA [print this page] SOA can be defined as a set of design and organizational principles that expose business logic and data as independent reusable services. The overall objective of SOA is to structure the organization such that business vision and requirements can drive IT towards the same goals without technology impeding achievement of objectives.
Lower IT Budgets
Due to increased competition and lower margins, companies are looking for lower budgets in managing their IT systems. According to Tom Pohlmann of Forrester Research, CIOs are seeing value in cutting costs and getting more out of their prior investments.
The SOA model has the ability to decrease IT budgets in several ways.
a. Since the underlying applications and technology to support an SOA are already in place at most large organizations, the development of service components is more about integrating existing application and business logic than it is about writing completely new systems.
b. SOA can lower IT budgets is by extending the useful life of certain business applications. Many of today's large business applications require frequent upgrades and, depending on their length of service, may need to be re-architect or replaced to meet new business requirements. With a SOA in place, IT organizations have a new method for meeting business requirements. Functionality from various applications, exposed via the services layer, can be integrated to create new applications, views of data, or automated processes. The continued use of IT assets, therefore, also contributes to a decrease in IT budgets.
c. The SOA inherently changes an IT organization's definition of development projects. Today, many IT organizations are still pursuing bigger implementations with tremendous amounts of capital, resources, and time dedicated to projects and with no guarantee of success. With
a SOA, projects are smaller in scope and are completed in less time. As a result, the capital investments and resources required to complete these projects are quite less.
Higher ROI on IT projects
Reduction in development time frames and the resources dedicated to these projects directly influence the costs associated with a project. Reducing the costs of development projects will positively affect ROI.
Promotes alignment of IT with Business
SOA adds value to an organization due to its ability to align the IT organization with the business drivers of an organization. The process of abstraction that is complete as part of SOA removes application specific complexities. This allows IT resources to focus on how to best use their portfolio of applications and data stores to meet the business requirements.
Higher Business flexibility
SOA contribution in the business flexibility is recommendable. According to a recent study of Fortune 500 companies, over 80% of companies had altered their business model in a given two-year period. Nearly 66% of these companies stated that their business model changes had been constrained by inflexible IT5.The speed of change is likely to increase going forward and business managers will have to adjust business models to meet customer and competitive pressures in a continuous manner. To be effective, these adjustments will have to be implemented rapidly and without the interference of IT limitations. Although a SOA will not remove all IT obstacles, a well-designed SOA does give IT managers a new method for creating solutions based on proven business applications.
Business Benefits from SOA
By: tajinder
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