Soa - Not A Technology Issue

Title :"Service Oriented Architecture - Not a Technology Idea"

Introduction

In the recent years we see a tremendous growth in businesses across the globe and we see a paradigm-shift in distributed computing from middleware component oriented architectures to Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). There is no agreed definition of SOA other than its literal translation. It is purely an architecture that relies on service-orientation as its fundamental design principle. The concepts can be applied to business, software applications and other types of consumer and producer systems. Gary Doucet (no date), executive director of architecture for the CIO branch of the Treasury Board Secretariat, believes SOA shows promise not just for application integration, but also for designing business processes. SOA has broader implications and not simply a technology idea. SOA is in itself a mechanism for defining business services and operating models. This paves way for providing a structure for IT to deliver against actual business requirements and adaptability to business thinking. SOA can be viewed in as a business mapping tool which is to ensure that the services created purely represent the business view and are not just what technologists think the business service should be.

The literature on SOA is vast and it is not my intention to refer to each of the existing publications on it. However, my prime focus would be on few keys areas related to SOAs alignment with business strategies. There is a deliberate attempt to not include any technical details and implementation on SOA. You may find a lot of publication that speaks on this. This paper presents a literature review with the following sections mentioned below, with an aim of explaining the non-technical aspects.

References

[1] A.W. Brown, S. Johnston, and K. Kelly. [2002]. Using service-oriented architecture and component-based development to build web service applications. Rational Software White Paper TP032

[2] Bielski, Lauren, [Dec2006], ABA Banking Journal; Vol. 98 Issue 12, p48-50, 3p

[3] Brian Schaffner, [Sep2007], 10+ things you should know about SOA., www.techrepublic.com

[4] Ahmed Elfatatry, Communications of the ACM; Aug2007, Vol. 50 Issue 8, p35-39,5p

[5] Jobber, D. ,[1998],Principles and Practice of Marketing. McGraw-Hill, NY

[6] Bennett, K., Layzell, P., Budgen, D., Brereton, P., Macaulay, L. and Munro, M.,[ca2000], Service-based software: The future for flexible software.,In Proceedings of the 7th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference, IEEE.

[7] Budgen, D., Brereton, P. and Turner, M.,[ca2004], Codifying a service architectural style. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual International Computer Softwareand Applications Conference, (Hong Kong, 2004). IEEE, 16-22.

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