Business-relevant SOA... is this an oxymoron? 

I don’t think so... We are actually seeing a maturing in the market in terms of how users, vendors and thought leaders are talking about SOA.  The dialog is much less about the speeds and feeds and much more around what SOA adoption ends up contributing to the business – in terms of efficiency, cost-savings, agility, competitiveness and innovation.

In this spirit, I’ve taken up the challenge of being a guest blogger on eBizQ with a focus on how IT is contributing to business results—while many of my posts will leverage my background and daily interactions with SOA, I will also blog on other key IT best practices in the applications and architecture space that show proven business results.

You can read my first two “warm up” blogs here.   Expect more prescriptive and focused posts within the next few weeks.   And, I’ve been challenged not to utter the words HP, BTO or Systinet in these posts… keeping it in the domain of best practices, not vendor talk.

And, on the subject of business-relevant SOA, the SOA Consortium just posted the results of their SOA Case Study winners here.  I found it quite valuable to read through and internalize these case studies.   They demonstrate clear, quantitative business results and benefits from SOA projects.  Plus they are sprinkled with pragmatic advice as to what the organizations did across people, process and technology to ensure success from the initial effort to scaling the project out across the organization.

Some highlights include Cisco’s Partner Deal Registration application, a SOA-based solution that reduced partner deal cycle time by 50% while increasing partner satisfaction.   In the domain of improved business processes are BlueStar Energy’s NextStar project which streamlined business processes and contributed $24 million in estimated savings over five years.  And FINRA’s SOA project which consolidated the NYSE Member regulation set of systems with NASD Member regulation systems, making a highly complex merger-driven consolidation pay off.  The Member Regulation function of FINRA (the new, merged regulator) benefited greatly as broker regulation tasks were simplified and accelerated.  

Finally, in the category of “I’m not sure if we want to improve the process”, the New York State department of Taxation and finance embarked on a SOA project called e-MPIRE.  The e-MPIRE project gave the department the ability to process high volumes of income tax returns.  The good news is that not only did it streamline the process but it also delivers refunds to taxpayers at an improved rate, with a near real time evaluation for fraud, up from 24 hours with the old system

 These are great examples of the business benefits of adopting SOA.  

 Finally, I’ll leave you with a paraphrase of three pragmatic points from the SOA Consortium in their recent post:  What are real people doing with SOA?  These three points level set on Business-driven SOA.

1. Create a portfolio of services that represent capabilities offered by, or required of, your organization including business, information, or technology concepts.  (My editorial comment – just don’t build services because you can or because your developer’s want to… make sure they have a clear purpose in your organization)

2. Compose or orchestrate those services along with events, rules and policies, into business processes and solutions that fulfill (priority) business scenarios.  I added the term “priority” as it makes sense to attach business challenges that the business both cares about and that will show quick enough pay-off to garner support for subsequent SOA efforts.  In other words, make sure you are orchestrating a process that is core to your business (i.e. a strategic objective, rather than the preverbial TPS reports (the movie Office Space comes to mind))

3. Never proceed without a business outcome in mind.  That “business outcome” could be cost and complexity reduction via a rationalized IT portfolio.  In other words, “business-driven” doesn’t require a business person tapping you on the shoulder, it means executing for business reasons.