Service Oriented Architecture: Myths, Reality and Maturity Model

Service Oriented Architecture: Myths, Reality and Maturity Model

Executive Summary:

The paper mainly portrays a disconnect between the theoretical approach of SOA and what actually happens in companies which have adopted SOA. In most companies, SOA is not seen as a vehicle for solving problems but, rather as a mere IT implementation. The author (Hirschheim) has conducted interviews with over 10 companies (early adopters of SOA) to analyze the drivers, processes, challenges of SOA implementation and how these challenges can be overcome. He prepared 7 research questions and the findings were detailed in the paper. Further, a 5 level Maturity Model was proposed for assessing the SOA implementation.

Discussion and Key Understandings:

The discussion was initiated by explaining the concept of SOA with a simple example “Consider you write a piece of code that is very generic i.e. something that can be used in a lot of applications such as an address book or a calculator. By launching this code on the IIS, you become a service provider as; you are providing a service through your code. Now someone wants to use a similar code then he does not have to write the code again. He simply uses your code through a web service. Hence he becomes a service consumer. Hence making a program using such services is called SOA.”

The discussion was further led by explaining the SOA Architecture as shown below:

Figure: SOA Architecture

A service provider creates a service and exposes the service by publishing it. Publishing is done by posting the service information on the service directory. When a service requester, needs a particular service, it searches the service directory that matches the requestor criteria. When a match is found, the service requester directly contacts the service provider, by using the information available on the service directory, thus fulfilling the requestor business needs.

The importance of SOA was addressed as one of the key discussions. The takeaway point was that large organizations run numerous applications and ERP systems. Most of these systems are stand alone, but the data managed and functionalities overlap. We discussed that these integrating these services would be a tedious task and consolidation of these services would be the right approach. Thus, we came to an understanding that large and complex organizations would be benefited with the implementation of SOA.

The key benefits of SOA gathered from the session are as follows:

i. Business Agility can be achieved through loose coupling, reuse and extensibility methods.

ii. Reduced