SOA and Business Architecture

Service Oriented Architecture SOA and Business Architecture

One area where SOA has been gaining ground is in its power as a mechanism for defining business services and operating models and thus provide a structure for IT to deliver against the actual business requirements and adapt in a similar way to the business. The purpose of using Service Oriented Architecture SOA as a business mapping tool is to ensure that the services created properly represent the business view and are not just what technologists think the business services should be. At the heart of Service Oriented Architecture SOA planning is the process of defining architectures for the use of information in support of the business, and the plan for implementing those architectures (Enterprise Architecture Planning by Steven Spewak and Steven Hill). Enterprise Business Architecture should always represent the highest and most dominant architecture. Every service should be created with the intent to bring value to the business in some way and must be traceable back to the business architecture.

Within this area, SOMA (Service-Oriented Modelling and Architecture) was announced by IBM as the first SOA-related methodology in 2004. Since then, efforts have been made to move towards greater standardization and the involvement of business objectives, particularly within the OASIS standards group and specifically the Service Oriented Architecture SOA Adoption Blueprints group. All of these approaches take a fundamentally structured approach to Service Oriented Architecture SOA, focusing on the Services and Architecture elements and leaving implementation to the more technically focused standards.