Business Benefits for SOA Adoption

It is interesting to try and understand the business drivers for SOA adoption. It is clear that these will be very different based on the size of the organisation, the industry sector, the value networks and the current level of IT adoption. Three areas have been looked based on the capabilities of SOA. These are:

1. Reusability
2. Service composition, orchestration and choreography
3. Loose coupling

A paper from webMethods uses the above mentioned capabilities of SOA to discover the business drivers for SOA adoption (http://www1.webmethods.com/PDF/The_Business_Case_for_SOA.pdf).

The arguments presented are highly relevant from a large firm perspective particularly for those with a high level of IT adoption. The challenge still remains for small and medium enterprises (SME) who mostly lag in IT adoption and this has been a concern from economic perspectives. The digital divide is significant and pundits predict that SOA is an answer to bridge the gap. But how? The above three capabilities of SOA are still useful for discovering the business drivers for SMEs. But what else needs to be understood before we embark on identifying the real business drivers? These are likely to be:

• Supply side and demand side capabilities and features
• Current barriers to IT adoption - Technology and non-technology issues
• Service needs and priorities

There is also the issue of availability of a public SOA for such a usage. Though the DBE Project is involved in creating such a facility it is going to take some time before it is ready to support any commercial service implementations.

Interesting blog on SOA in third world.