Qual è il valore della SOA

Il "valore" di una architettura SOA deve essere analizzato con due angolature differenti: valore per il Business e per l'IT.

Riprendo da un blog americano:

Business Value
The business gets value when SOA is used as an enabler of BPM. You can reengineer your process all day, but you need to allow these business processes to communicate with your legacy systems. The business can't wait for IT to blow up legacy applications in order to create new user interfaces with robust workflows under the covers. Instead IT must abstract the legacy layer and make it easy to build composite front end applications that leverage years of investments in the legacy applications. This allows IT to deliver huge amounts of value to the business in a relatively short amount of time using the right tools (BPMS).

IT Value
The value for IT is in reuse and speed to market. As your SOA matures, the amount of reuse grows exponentially. If you architect SOA correctly, you will move from creating services to consuming services. Once you have built a good baseline of abstract services, you can quickly meet the business's demands by assembling business services rather then building them from scratch each time. Think of it as Lego building. If you start with a hand full of white and red Legos that are rectangular in shape, you can create a few nice structures out of them.

Then you add more colors, followed by new shapes (circles, squares, arcs, etc.), followed by custom pieces (parts for trucks, trains, buildings, boats, etc.) and soon you can build an unlimited amount of structures.


The Real Problem
What I see as the real problem preventing companies from successfully deploying and realizing value from SOA is they don't fully understand SOA and they underestimate the amount of change to the culture. So here are the list of non technical issues that will kill your SOA project:

• If you don't align SOA with a key business driver, you greatly reduce the odds that you will ever reap the rewards of SOA.
  
• If you don't include BPM in your SOA implementation, then SOA becomes just another IT buzzword for the business and not an enabler.
  
• If you don't take a proactive approach to change management, resistance will prevail and you will spin your wheels dealing with change (been there, done that).

Key take away
The problem with SOA isn't SOA, it's people. People must understand SOA and the importance of aligning their initiative with a key business driver. BPM is the killer application that can get your business sponsors on board.