Can You Have SOA without IT?

SOA Articles : Can You Have SOA without IT? by Melissa Peterman

There have been recent conversations whether a Service Oriented Architecture ( SOA) could replace an IT department of an organization. The answer is no. It is common to put SOA governance and IT in the same basket but the two don’t have that much in common.

SOA is an architectural style with a goal to achieve loose coupling among interacting software agents, helping to manage business services, whereas IT governance is focused on managing technology.

For example, SOA is like owning a burger franchise that is also like the other burger franchises, anyone can go to the different burger places and expect to get the same thing, but at different locations. Everything is great as long as the service is running smooth. If there is a bump in the road, say the burger recipe for all of the stores went missing, they would need to call in an expert, (IT help) to find a solution. Once the recipe was found, (the bug fixed by the IT person), the SOA system would then continue to run fine, but IT is an essential part of the SOA ebb and flow. Granted, imagine if an IT person was the only one who manually made sure that each transaction within each burger franchise went smoothly? It would be a burger franchise disaster. Therefore, a service oriented architecture helps keep all burger franchise systems working smoothly with an IT person on call. Can businesses save money by purchasing an SOA system in conjunction with their current system?

Businesses can save money with an SOA system and scale down their current IT department but not remove the IT department all together. In fact, business processes are only streamlined by having the two together. According to a recent report, in 2007, companies spent $1.4 million on SOA. The report found in a survey among IT executives from China, US and Germany that 22% claimed faster speed and less risk was the main reason to get an SOA , 18% claimed reduce IT costs and %17 claimed reuse. An SOA provides all of these things and more. You could say that an SOA is enterprise governance only, not governance over IT. With the two together, businesses are finding so many ways to reorganize, restructure and reuse their current database and in turn create profits.

About the Author
About the author:Melissa Peterman is a web content specialist for Innuity. For more information about SOA go to Mark Logic.

Source: GoArticles.com

Integrating Six Sigma With Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

SOA Articles : Integrating Six Sigma With Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) by Tony Jacowski

Businesses need to realize the fact that SOA works well only when it is integrated with time-tested quality improvement initiatives such as Six Sigma.

For proof, they just need to look at the work records of businesses that are reaping the benefits of SOA after integrating it with Six Sigma concepts and methodologies.

The Integration Process

SOA basically deals with the planning, conceptualizing and designing of new customer oriented services from scratch in line with organizational goals and objectives. This is why the success of SOA depends a lot on the decisions made by management during the initial stages of SOA implementations. Since SOA does not provide for the necessary checks and balances, it has to depend on highly effective Six Sigma methodologies such as Design For Six Sigma (DFSS).

DFSS may not have been originally designed for use with SOA, but still it helps because it ensures that all decisions related to the design and development of new services are made on the basis of sound logic and verifiable scientific and statistical theories. Explained below are the five phases involved in the Six Sigma and SOA integration process.

Define: In this phase, DFSS helps in defining the goals and objectives of the SOA implementations. When SOA goals and objectives are set using DFSS, the chances of failures get automatically reduced, something that is quite necessary, considering the fact that the set goals and objectives will ultimately have a direct bearing on customer satisfaction levels.

Conceptualize: The conceptualization phase, which involves plenty of innovation on part of the developers, is made easy with DFSS, as it helps the developers to design the best possible services with the available human and financial resources. If DFSS is not applied in this phase, it could easily lead to project delays due to indecisiveness on part of the developers.

Design: In this phase, DFSS helps in charting out the design details of the newly conceptualized customer oriented service. Elaborating on the details helps the SOA implementation team to understand the rationale behind the new service design and how it can be used for satisfying customer needs and expectations.

Validate: If DFSS is used right from the first phase, it is highly unlikely that the SOA initiative will fail to deliver the desired results, but since the probability of errors can never be denied, it makes sense to conduct the validation process. If the SOA initiative passes the validation test as specified by DFSS, then it can be given the green signal for organization-wide implementations.

Control: In this phase, DFSS plays the role of a manager and a controller so as to ensure that the desired results are achieved through the SOA implementations. DFSS is based on the concept of continuous improvements, something that it passes onto SOA so as to make it just as effective and efficient.

SOA certainly holds great potential, especially for businesses that rely heavily on the use of technological infrastructure. By integrating SOA with Six Sigma, businesses can easily unlock the inherent potential of SOA and transform themselves into highly efficient organizations.

About the Author
Tony Jacowski is a quality analyst for The MBA Journal. Aveta Solution's Six Sigma Online offers online six sigma training and certification classes for lean six sigma, black belts, green belts, and yellow belts.

Source: GoArticles.com

Ask The SOA Expert: Questions & Answers

Ask The SOA Expert: Questions & Answers

Intelligence in the network, and policies-based security measures will grow in importance and technical depth over the next several years. While much has been done at the transactional level to manage security, there are still many pockets of XML traffic that are not being scrutinized for security vulnerabilities.

But the larger threat is not about the technologies, it's about the policies and how security as a discipline is managed and maintained across an organization. You can't just look at XML content security from the network level, you need to look at it acoss all the levels, or the vulnerabilities will be discovered by someone other than those that should.

Source: soahub.com

SOA or DOA

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) or Dead On Arrival (DOA)

Web applications built on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) promise to greatly improve IT efficiency and business agility. SOA establishes data and protocol standards so that existing internal and third-party application modules or services can be reused and orchestrated into business applications. Unfortunately, while SOA enables the rapid implementation of business applications, it also greatly increases the complexity of managing performance when these applications are deployed in production – often diminishing the benefits of the SOA adoption. Without an effective way of monitoring application performance, and quickly diagnosing and correcting problems, there is a high likelihood that an SOA could be dead on arrival (DOA).

Source: soahub.com