Contemporary SOA promotes organizational agility

Contemporary SOA promotes organizational agility

Whether the result of an internal reorganization, a corporate merger, a change in an organization's business scope, or the replacement of an established technology platform, an organization's ability to accommodate change determines the efficiency with which it can respond to unplanned events.

Change in an organization's business logic can impact the application technology that automates it. Change in an organization's application technology infrastructure can impact the business logic automated by this technology. The more dependencies that exist between these two parts of an enterprise, the greater the extent to which change imposes disruption and expense.

By leveraging service business representation, service abstraction, and the loose coupling between business and application logic provided through the use of service layers, SOA offers the potential to increase organizational agility (Figure 3.16).
Figure 3.16. A loosely coupled relationship between business and application technology allows each end to more efficiently respond to changes in the other.






Other benefits realized through the standardization of SOA also contribute to minimizing dependencies and increasing overall responsiveness to change: notably, the intrinsic interoperability that can be built into services and the open communications framework established across integration architectures that enable interoperability between disparate platforms. Change imposed on any of these environments is more easily facilitated for the same reasonsa loosely coupled state between services representing either ends of the communication channel.

Organizational agility is perhaps the most significant benefit that can be realized with contemporary SOA.