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Articles of Note, Tech Innovation, Oct. 2008, No. 3
By Lisa Ahn
For a long time, companies have tried to integrate existing present and prospective systems in order to implement IT support across the business spectrum. Updates of older technologies enable companies to make their IT systems available to internal or external customers. What often results, however, is a burden of multiple applications in charge of different processes, all glued together by an increasingly rigid system that cannot meet business demands.
To better support the connection of various applications, an agile standardized architecture is essential. This unifies business processes by structuring large applications as an ad hoc collection of smaller modules called services, where components are reusable and consistent. With an SOA, different groups of people both inside and outside the company can use these applications easily.
What is SOA?
Service-Oriented architecture (SOA) can defined as a group of services that communicate with each other. Functionalities are grouped around business processes and packaged as interoperable services. Hence, SOA’s IT infrastructure allows different applications to exchange data with one another as they participate in business processes.
SOA separates functions into distinct units, or services, which are made accessible over a network. These services are software chunks that communicate with each other by passing data from one service to another, or by coordinating an activity between two or more services. They are also easily linked with other software components, and can be easily combined and reused in the production of business applications.
Examples of services include filling out an online application for an account, viewing an online bank statement, or placing an online booking or airline ticket order. SOA takes the redundancy out of inputting the same personal information to open an online checking, savings, and IRA account for banking.
In addition, at the core of services lies abstraction, where you can assemble software code into a chunk to be shared and reused in many different areas of the company. For example, the software code that goes into creating an automated task like sending a query to a credit reporting website to verify a customer’s loan qualification can be reused later for a similar service—rather than having to write the code from scratch.
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