Businessmen have always had a love-hate relationship with information technology (IT). Since the 1950s, when they began to automate their processes and systems, IT has seemed an arcane, dark world with its own language, mystique and unfathomable acronyms.<\/p>\n
Each successive wave of technology seems more complex than the previous one and nowhere is this more true than in software development.<\/p>\n
Software applications are vital to the running of any organisation today, as they automate and embed business processes. However, unless they represent the best thinking and practice in an industry, they can inhibit the organisation’s smooth running. As they age, their cost of maintenance soars, they inhibit change, they come to reflect dated thinking, and they can become a hindrance. Moreover, they prevent a single view of the organisation.<\/p>\n
This has happened in almost every financial services organisation of substance, where they are still running decades-old applications on mainframes. Executives know these systems are now a competitive disadvantage due to the cost of maintenance, the expensive hardware they run on, their inability to reflect and embrace new customer channels such as the internet, the way they inhibit new business and market penetration, and the sheer overhead they add to product development and customer engagements.<\/p>\n
One solution to these challenges is service-oriented architecture, or SOA. SOA can be as difficult to understand as other aspects of IT and there is some confusion as to what it is and in whose domain it should exist. Because it leads to the production of software for the business, it is inevitably run into the arms of IT, whereas it should have direct board representation.<\/p>\n
To understand SOA, it is necessary to break the term into its two constituent components: service-oriented describes a corporate intention to deliver all software applications in a style consistent with the service definition, while architecture refers to a depiction of all the software assets of the organisation, much as a standard architecture references all the components that make a building. <\/p>\n
As the software represents the business processes, it is clear an architecture can help the organisation gain a holistic view of its processes, one of the first deliverables of the SOA exercise.<\/p>\n
It is also necessary to define a service. A service is a piece of software, or a component, built in such a way that it can easily be linked to, or integrated with, other components. The notion behind services is simple: technology should be delivered in intelligible components rather than as a vast, monolithic omnibus suite such as enterprise resource planning has come to be.<\/p>\n
At the heart of services is abstraction, which refers to the idea that software code can be built into a chunk with sufficient meaning that it can be shared and reused across many different parts of the organisation. The goal of reuse has been one pursued by the IT industry, and the business it supports, for more than three decades.<\/p>\n
For example, a bank would apply for a credit rating from an external agency many times across its business units. In the past each unit would have written its own credit rating application. In SOA, the credit rating process would be written once, abstracted to a higher level, and made available to the entire organisation as a service. The savings are self-evident.<\/p>\n
Without getting too technical, this is achieved by writing a piece of code called a wrapper, which is an interface that describes the purpose of the component of software and how to connect to it. Different types of wrappers can be used on various kinds of components, such that even unchanged legacy code encapsulating business logic many decades old can be reused and incorporated into SOA. <\/p>\n
This makes for happy IT and business as it deepens return on investment while enhancing business agility.<\/p>\n
Indeed, agility is one of the most profound promises of SOA, along with reduced time to market, lower IT costs and a closer relationship between business and IT.<\/p>\n
Most organisations of substance have begun the move to SOA, but lack of executive insight into its value is hindering adoption. <\/p>\n
– Richard Firth is CEO and chairman of MIP Holdings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Businessmen have always had a love-hate relationship with information technology, since the 1950s, when they began to automate their processes and systems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7408"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7408\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}