Your Data In a Service Oriented Architecture

Many users of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) only see the promise of delivering Services at the outer limits of the IT infrastructure, but why not use the same concepts for basic data ?

Ultimately any organization is only as good as the raw data that it holds. This includes the basic data used to maintain customer and sales records right up to the management data used to plan for the future of an organization. Many organizations do not see the advantages to accessing this data as a service; they simply see the data as something other services use.

There are many good reasons to treat access to an organization’s data as a service for the following reasons:

• The data will normally be accessed by more than one different application; a standards based SOA offers such reusability.
  
   


• New data elements will be needed from time to time to support ongoing business requirements; a  standards based SOA offers the ability to manage or govern such changes.
  
   


• Many problems are caused by tight coupling of applications with the data; loose coupling offered by  standards based SOA resolves many of these problems.
  
   


• Connectivity using SQL or other mechanisms can be complex to configure and support; a standards based SOA can allow access to the data with no additional configuration.

From the above it is clear that adopting a service oriented approach to accessing your organization’ s data  can deliver all the benefits a SOA can offer right down to accessing your organization’s back end data. The a SOA Gateway is the ideal tool to enable you to make your data available as service

“Service Reuse” in a SOA – What does this mean ?

One of the great promises of a SOA is the ability to ‘reuse’ services; but what does this mean ?

If you refer to ‘What is a service’ you will see that in many ways, IT Services may be equated to standard things that you may do in your business such as issuing an invoice. The issuing of the invoice is an internal service within your organization that happens when a transaction is executed with a customer such as when a widget is sold.

Consider the situation whereby a new widget, let’s call it ‘widgetx’ is now available to be sold by your organization. This requires a small change to the invoicing process. You are unlikely to bring in a new resource and process to process this new invoicing requirement; you will reuse the existing resources you have and adapt the process (if necessary) to handle the new requirement. You ‘reuse’ your internal ‘service’ in order to make better use of resources, save money and streamline your organization.

In the IT world in the past, service reuse occurred somewhat rarely if at all and thus instead of reusing existing IT services, a new service was introduced equating to a new resource and process in the previous example. This added cost and complexity which multiplied exponentially as IT services were not reused and raised major integration problems between departments in an organization or between organizations.

A standards based SOA enables IT services to be reused in much the same way as the invoice example above. It enables easy reuse of existing IT services to provide extra processing for new requirements. It also enables the controlled updating of the IT service when necessary to handle additional requirements to avoid service duplication resulting in many similar but different services being available. This saves organizations money in the short run by quickly having new IT services up and running and in the long run by ensuring that IT services evolve correctly going forward to support ongoing business requirements.

The SOA Gateway is the perfect tool to help you achieve service reuse.

What is a "Service" in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Many people struggle with the term ‘Service Oriented Architecture’ or SOA on the basis that there is some extensive knowledge required to understand it. Technical organizations are selling their products using the term ‘SOA’ as if the term itself is a panacea for all the IT problems of the past: it has ‘SOA’ in the marketing blurb.....quick, get the cheque book out and buy one.

Unfortunately, almost every supplier has jumped on the bandwagon and there is SOA this and SOA that to the degree that many people are now saying ‘SOA What’ ? This shouldn’t be the case as SOA has for the first time succeeded to a degree to bridge the gap between the business and the technical.

The basic principle of SOA is that services are created and reused. Consider your own business goals and see what you try to do. Don’t you provide one or more ‘services’ which your customers use and are repeated many times a day when things are going well ? When you have a successful service, be it a service that sells books online or a service fixes washing machines, you will try to improve it where it needs improvement and to replicate it such that you can service more customer requests.

The ‘Service’ in SOA is essentially an IT representation of what you might do to support your successful business services. In terms of your Service, you may actually have a number of back end services that are used to fulfil the customer requirements. For example, you may have a person who raises invoices when someone purchases something. The raising of an invoice is more or less identical whether you are servicing a washing machine or servicing a boiler. Someone has purchased something and now needs to pay for it.

In most organizations, you already implement a SOA in your day to day workings. Translate this to the IT world and all that changes is that where it makes sense, a service is implementing by some computer process to do the same thing quickly and consistently time and time again. The goal of an IT Service must be to save cost on how the ‘Service’ is currently implemented and to make this more efficient, quicker or more accurate.

Taken a step further, your IT department may map this service back to other services but you don’t need to care. Once your business service is implemented and working, do you really care how it works in the background once it runs ? If you need changes, you don’t really care how this is done technically you just want your service to support new functionality ?

There you are, you know a lot more about Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) than you thought and in fact in many cases your organization has been doing this for years. The good news is that IT has finally caught up with the business and can implement the business services you require, where it makes sense, as IT Services in a SOA and the SOA Gateway enables organizations to implement such services.