| Title: |
Enhancing the Enterprise Architecture with Service Orientation |
| Author: |
John Butler & Dan Ellis |
| Publication Date: |
17 October 2007 |
| Report Type: |
Journal |
| Report Class: |
Best Practice |
| Abstract: |
Enterprise architecture (EA) is a rapidly maturing practice used widely in business and government as a valuable tool, not just from a technology perspective but also in terms of understanding business operations overall. For example the US Federal Government Office of Management and Budget (OMB) requires that all Executive Branch Federal Agencies must have and maintain comprehensive enterprise architecture. Despite this raised level of maturity and emphasis, many organizations are struggling to get measurable value back from their investments in EA. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a proven approach for organizing information systems, business and infrastructure architectures enabling business agility. It is therefore going to be critical that best practice in EA is extended to incorporate SOA perspectives. This article explains the relationship of SOA to EA and provides guidance on how to extend typical EA models with service orientation. |
| Backgrounder: |
The current architectural complexity has become so great in large organizations that even adoption of new technology products is a costly, high-risk, and time-consuming endeavor with legacy solutions often lingering for years after newer technologies are adopted. For commercial organizations in highly competitive fields, agility enables new technologies to be exploited to create a competitive advantage in the market place. EA techniques are widely used to address this complexity, and to facilitate better decision making.
Today, SOA is seen as one of the key enablers of business agility and its widespread adoption throughout the IT product vendor space necessitates that organizations learn to manage and exploit SOA. ERP products, such as SAP and Oracle, have adopted SOA as the primary paradigm for systems integration. SAP is delivered with an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Other COTS products and 3rd Party Service providers rely on SOA for their integration approach as well and as more and more software functions are commoditized, organizations will rely more heavily on these COTS products and 3rd party services.
To capitalize on new technologies and products, organizations have to mature their SOA capability so they can effectively integrate these packaged services to transparently support their business operations. This means incorporating SOA into their enterprise architecture planning process since this is typically the mechanism used by large organizations to plan their overall business and technology architecture evolution.
However, there is also a more urgent driver for incorporating service architecture into the enterprise architecture. All of the Integrated Development Environments (IDE) today can rapidly publish any .Net or Java class as a Web service. The implication of this is that your organizations service architecture may be defined at the whim of any developer or architect. And while most are professionals that are making good design decisions, few, if any, have the enterprise perspective to identify the optimal collection of services for the enterprise without a broad planning process
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| Report Size: |
14 pages |
| Report Access Type: |
 | Silver/Gold (Premium) |
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