The promise of SOA - Agility and choice

SOA is not an end in itself. It is largely a response from the IT department to the inability of IT systems to be changed as the business requires. At the same time, SOA is also a potential enabler of choice. Let's face it, most of us like choice. But we are still very much stuck in the industrialized era where we as consumers are configuring products rather than consuming personalized services.

To succeed with making SOA an enabler of agility and choice, it requires involvement and commitment from other parts of the business than the IT department. The architectural principles of a SOA (encapsulation, loose coupling, abstraction, service contract, and so forth) must be understood and applied by the entire organization, not only IT part of it. The IT department has always been considered as service to the rest of the business and with SOA the IT department has found a means to make the IT systems truly reflect that. But the IT department should not do this in isolation. Rather, each part of the business should think and organize itself in the same way, as a service provider of resources to the rest of the business. Only then can the promise of SOA in terms of agility and choice be fully realized.