SOA is a wave that has hit the IT industry and its buzz is far reaching the minds and ears of executives. However, there are organizations that are struggling to find any sense in SOA. SOA for some has been simply a new type of architecture that does not add any value to their existing business model. Executives will be reluctant to spend money if ROI is not well defined for going to SOA. Executives often get curious to understand the risks and benefits of SOA and how these can be applied to their business. Often times they ask, Is SOA a placebo for an IT infrastructure? Does SOA solve all IT problems? Can SOA fix their application bugs? Can SOA relieve operations of their nightmares with production issues?

At the onset, SOA is a concept and a thought process. It is a thought process that can get an IT organization to a maturity model from which they can leverage to sustain their development and operations. If implemented in the right way, it can transform and create new business models and lead organizations into new avenues and growth areas. Go and google and you will find endless articles and documents talking about the benefits that SOA can present and so I will utilize my blog space for something more meaningful and real. According to me the greatest benefit is when the organization can become creative about their business and be able to apply SOA model to it. This why I am saying so...

At a recent consulting engagement I had been to, I was discussing a product roadmap with a Product Manager of that organization and it was an interesting thing to find that the product road map was aligned to what IT delivers. What this means is that if IT always delivers a monolithic product at the end, it is only possible to think of product roadmap as feature enhancements. Also, the feature milestones were dictated by IT since many a times it was a rework to their existing product. The Product Manager did confess that since they are working with such constraints, it is difficult for them to accelerate their product delivery. They are also unable to apply their product delivery to new business models and new areas that they can expand into. So once I told him if he were to think differently of his product as not just product rather as, you guess it right, Services, the discussions turned to be more positive and fruitful.

We dismantled their product architecture into services and also derived the composition of services at various levels and layers. For example, we discussed how these services can be rendered to their customers as Portal services and allow their customers to personalize and customize. Customization and personalization in turn provides a rich value add when delivering services. We also discussed how we can compose services as a back end composition layer with help from an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) or a pure integration app. This type of composition basically depends of what the level of integration (light weight or heavy weight workflow). Light weight composition allowed flexibility in making composition changes as per business needs and demands. Heavy weight is more centric to customizations needed by specific customers. In essence we were strictly trying to think of their product in a SOA model.

Our discussions then led from one thing to another and in the end were were discussing new business models. The Product Manager was so excited about this concept and was infact able to map out his product roadmap in terms of services delivery and how the services delivery can then to applied to new business models. I was really happy to find myself in that mix and hence this blog :-)

SOA is more of a thought process and mindset that needs to be applied to business effectively. It is a vision that needs to be rolled out as part of SOA inception across the organization. SOA awareness becomes a key in realization. Unless an organization has assimilated SOA in its business model, it is difficult to truly realize its benefits.