The promise of SOA is flexibility and agility. I define agility as the ability to adapt to change at the speed of business. In today's global economy which has been fueled by collaboration and Internet technologies, businesses change at a much faster rate than ever before. So how does SOA help companies become agile? Let's look at a logical view of a typical SOA.
You can see in this diagram how each layer of the architecture has been abstracted and is mutually exclusive or "loosely coupled" from the other layers of the architecture. Why is this important? The answer is simple.....ease of change! Here are some advantages of this approach.
- Share services, components, rules, etc. across the enterprise (reuse)
- Isolate changes and reduce dependencies (speed to market)
- Minimize impact of business changes (speed to market)
- Easier to maintain (maintainability)
Let me give an example of how this approach helps companies become agile.
Use Case: New customer data from a new client
Let's say your company provides a service for customers in the retail industry. You have a website that offers online services for consumers and your white label solution is tailored to look like it is hosted by the individual retailers. The problem is that each retailer has their own customer database. In the past you would have to write a ton of code for each retailer that you signed up to use your services. With SOA, now it is a simple data mapping exercise. By abstracting data services, the other layers of the architecture use the logical representation of customer, not the physical implementation. Behind the scenes, the data services layer is translating the request for customer data from logical view to physical implementation. So when you bring on new clients, you simply use a tool in the data services layer to map the new clients customer data to the standard logical definition as defined by the architecture.
You can see from this example that all three retailers have an entirely different implementation of their customer database including different naming conventions and even different attributes. In the data services layer, you can map all of these physical implementations to one standard customer definition. You can also see how the business processes all use the logical view of customer. This allows us to add and change customer definitions on the back end without changing code on the front end. If two more retailers were to sign up tomorrow, we can map their definitions to the logical customer view and be done. No Code!!! That is agile!
I will give examples of agility within the other layers in future posts. If you would like help establishing a data services strategy, give me a shout!
