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.