VideoWhile Moore's Law and fierce competition among vendors virtually guarantee that your IT dollar will continuously gain in purchasing power, don't let the good deals blind you to an underlying truth: the complexity of what you're buying may be no bargain at all. In a recent study of more than 20 large enterprises, Boston Consulting Group found that as time went on and these large companies acquired an expanding arsenal of IT, far from gaining economies of scale they were in fact left with "diseconomies of complexity." Think of it as scope creep on a macro level, as a glut of homegrown and packaged software, hardware, network capacity, and sundry other aspects of IT become ever more costly to maintain, impede new projects, and hamstring companies' efforts to respond to changes in the business climate.
This complexity crisis is a key selling point for vendors of utility computing (see "The Meter System," Summer), and in fact most companies in the IT world now emphasize simplification as a selling point. But as IT is called upon to build new applications and extend old ones to the Web, support ever-shifting business strategies, outsource this process or that, accommodate mergers and acquisitions, meet regulatory burdens, and, of course, work faster within tighter budgets, companies may not be able to spend their way toward a brighter future. New thinking may be called for, a new way to frame IT strategy that provides a handle on complexity while improving ROI and better aligning IT activities with the enterprise as a whole.
That, at least, is the argument made by proponents of service-oriented architecture, or SOA. While the term underscores the IT industry's continuing inability to concoct catchy phrases, don't let its clunkiness lead you to believe that it can be left solely to the IT department. SOA promises a more momentous shift in business technology than client/server or even Web-based computing. "This is a significant and big movement within IT," claims Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at research firm ZapThink. "This is the maturing of an industry, with competitors agreeing on some important standards that will help them all accommodate each other." Even Microsoft, he points out, is throwing its weight behind the standards that make SOA possible.
Traditionally architected IT systems tightly intertwine so many aspects of the business processes they automate that making even simple changes to some facet of the operation is enormously difficult. Similarly, it's difficult to get several systems — each originally installed, potentially, by a different business unit pursuing its own tactical goals, with no coordinated planning — to share their data or cooperate in executing complex business transactions. Either a company springs for a costly integration project or its employees cope by opening different applications on the same crowded PC screens and flipping back and forth between them. There are some clever new workarounds (see "You Make Me Feel Young Again"), but while they can help extend the life of older applications, they can't address the larger risk of an entire IT system collapsing under its own weight.
Not so with the new architecture. Ongoing, incremental, unanticipated change is its raison d'etre. SOA calls for enterprises to create, acquire, and make use of software functionality in the form of easily containable and reusable services that are easily joined to create useful and complete applications. In other words, monolithic gives way to mix-and-match, as Lego-like building blocks of software are recombined in almost endless combinations. An individual service can handle anything from a frequently invoked IT-level task such as converting dollars to a foreign currency to full-blown business processes such as scheduling a factory assembly line. Each service is a self-contained chunk of functionality or process that can be called into action by traditional computer programs and other services. Indeed, many services will end up being composed of other services, which in turn may contain still more, and so on.
While this emerging category of IT services is based on standards, they are defined in purely functional terms, without reference to any details about how or where they are executed. That, in theory, makes them easy to stitch together, pull apart, reconfigure, reuse, and even replace — again and again, any time a company wants to change a business process. This is possible because these services and the functions they perform are not nearly as tightly bound together as they would be in traditional software. Instead, as techies put it, the services are "loosely coupled."
This approach represents the latest attempt to create reusable software. Once a service has been developed, many different applications can employ it at the same time. Reusing software with older techniques and now with SOA has saved AXA Financial some $55 million in development costs during the past 15 years, according to Don Buskard, senior vice president and CTO. AXA has built a user-authorization service, for instance, that all of its approximately 25 applications make use of. "Our legacy systems are like big gears with big teeth, while our customer-facing applications are like small gears that turn faster," says Buskard. "We need to connect them, and SOA lets us do that."
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