There has traditionally been a gap between what the business wants from its IT and what IT can deliver. At its worst, many people on the business side consider the IT guys to be too interested in technology; while many IT people don’t always understand why the business asks for what it does.

The problem stems from the fact that up until now, there hasn’t really been a way for the business to express what they want and for the IT guys to fully understand it and why.

We need to consider that the business thinks in terms of process and what it takes to complete a ‘business interaction’. On the other hand  IT people tend to think in terms of transactions i.e. one ‘logical interaction’ with the IT system which either retrieves or updates one or more data records.

Using an SOA approach to this problem, it’s possible for the business and the IT to start sharing a common language. The business process must be broken down into what ‘services’ are required from the IT system. These services may be defined by:

-         What they achieve (e.g. creating an order).

-         What data is supplied as input (e.g. what the customer wants to order).

-         What data is expected as output (e.g. an order number).

While the business will see a full process as consisting of multiple services (e.g. receive order, place order on system, process order, deliver order, invoice customer, and receive payment), by defining the individual interactions with the IT system  (i.e. the services they want) they suddenly start speaking a language that the transactional  IT side understands.

The IT people then know what needs to be done, what data is received on input and what data is sent on output. How they implement and support this is up to them and the business doesn’t care once it does what they want. So both sides end up happy.

While it may take one or more cycles to get final agreement on the services, once they have been agreed, there is a formal ‘contract’ of sorts in place between the business and IT. As a small starting point, this shows how even during the planning phase, a SOA can provide benefit by getting the business and IT into the same camp as it were. The SOA Gateway is a valuable tool that can help the business and the IT people to create services with this in mind.