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However, as those functions become more critical to the enterprise, and as
the cost of performing them is lower than in an internally-provided service,
the organization may eventually insource those functions. In this manner,
the service-oriented business model is one of optimizing core and context
processes (per Geoffrey Moore’s book Living on the Fault Line
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), and lever-
aging service providers as necessary to achieve the overall optimal structure
of internally- and externally-provided transactions in support of the busi-
ness model. This is SOA as a business model.
SOA as an IT strategy is an extension of the SOA business model. An
SOA-enabled IT strategy explicitly embraces concepts of service providers
and service consumers, and seeks to optimize IT services provided to the busi-
ness by leveraging SOA concepts. Thus, the combination of IT services will
be optimized through a combination of internally- and externally-provided
services, which helps realize the profitability goals of the enterprise. The
SOA IT strategy perspective also means that there is an SOA strategy, that
the SOA strategy enables the SOA business model, and that it is expressed
technically through a clearly defined and articulated enterprise architecture
and the resulting portfolio of services that, when exposed and implemented,
enable the optimal end-to-end execution of business transactions for max-
imizing profit. Again, this is from the perspective of a for profit enterprise.
SOA is also an architecture approach or paradigm, along with a sup-
porting implementation pattern that realizes that architectural approach in
support of the IT strategy and the SOA business model. SOA extends an
organization’s enterprise architecture to include concepts of services, both
logical and physical descriptions of services, as well as the required SOA
infrastructure and tools, and the SOA platform for service design, quality
assurance and testing, and service runtime operations.
The SOA implementation pattern includes the implementation of the
SOA platform and enabling technology as well as the SOA-enabled services/
software development lifecycle (SDLC) that accommodates both service pro-
vider processes and service consumer processes of the enterprise. The SOA
implementation pattern enables business applications or capabilities to be
assembled through the consumption of services provided through the SOA
architecture and SOA implementation patterns. The assembly of business
applications from reusable services is how an organization realizes SOA val-
ue through services reuse, integration avoidance, agility through application
assembly and rapid time to market, and the many other benefits of SOA.
Although the definition is technically accurate, SOA is far more than an
‘‘architecture’’ comprised of ‘‘services.’’ SOA is an architectural approach
and operating model predicated on the concept of reusable ‘‘services,’’ or
chunks of business logic or business processes that are shared by enterprise
consumers. Services are message-invoked modules of business logic, process
The Inevitable SOA Trend 3