How can you maximise your IT to stay ahead?

In 2006, Gartner says 60% of businesses will implement Services Oriented Architectures (SOA) to deliver the necessary applications and processes to better compete and change.

This trend isn’t going away as the usage of SOA by companies will increase to 80% by 2008.  In fact, the leaders that implement SOA well will be able to rapidly change the way their businesses work to meet the ever-changing demands of their customers, according to Eric Austvold, research director at AMR Research.

Learn how SOA can transform your IT infrastructure to increase the flexibility and usability of your IT assets for better business solutions.

The need for a new IT foundation
The need for growth and increased responsiveness were identified as two of the most important current challenges in a Conference Board survey of CEOs and CIOs.

As the marketplace globalises, new markets, new workforces, and new competitors are forcing companies to look for ways to adapt more quickly.  Industry leaders are trying to improve their company’s efficiency and productivity while being able to quickly exploit emerging business opportunities through the deployment of new business services and applications.

Companies also need to have quicker and better access to information to continually meet the demands of their stakeholders (employees, customers and partners). This is not possible unless they have the ability to deploy information and application assets across the entire organisation without having to worry about the underlying IT infrastructure.

Business process changes that used to happen annually must now be made on a monthly, weekly or daily basis. To accomplish this, it is essential to reduce the cycle time for the maintenance and development of IT solutions.

A survey of CIOs revealed that making better use of existing investments to help create new value is a major concern. Utilising existing services and application resources to rapidly create new applications and business processes is the challenge.

Streamlining business processes can be difficult and costly, if it requires replacing some, if not all, of the existing IT infrastructure. As well, making IT changes can sometimes lead to a combination of in-house and off the shelf vendor solutions, which can result in a patchwork of ad-hoc, incompatible solutions.

The need to simplify the integration of multi-vendor IT environments along with the ability to use current IT assets and combine them with new technologies is more important than ever.

The foundation needs to be flexible
SOA is about structuring business processes and IT assets into interchangeable “building blocks”.

These flexible “building blocks” are secure, standardised components (services) that can help build new business process capabilities or be used and built for whatever your business needs.

SOA is made possible by a standards-based service component architecture (SCA) that makes these IT assets reusable. The main technology behind SOA is Web Services.

Web Services is a set of standardised protocols, process descriptions, and interfaces.  Web Services separates interface technology from implementation technology, thereby allowing the same services to be used by multiple applications

Using business applications built with SOA can help you:

• Make changes to business processes without lengthy and risky IT projects
• Create building blocks of IT services for better integration
• Integrate and automate business processes easily for better business operations
• Leverage existing or new assets to reduce maintenance, development, and deployment costs
• Better align IT with business strategy
• Customise and adopt new structures at your level and speed.

Renovation success stories
SOA is already helping many businesses in many industries renovate their IT environment for improved conditions.

For example, Cirque du Soleil implemented SOA with an eye to improving customer and employee service. SOA helped Cirque create a new mobile solution to integrate with email and ERP systems using existing IT assets, managed through a Web Browser dashboard.

Cirque was able to experience greater business flexibility gained through real time connections to critical scheduling and a centrally managed inventory. Streamlining processes, increasing flexibility and improving remote employee productivity has helped Cirque reach out to bigger audiences in more cities around the world.

Olex Cables, a mid-market communication company, was able to improve its customer responsiveness by implementing an SOA solution, which improved its call center response times from several minutes to a few seconds.  Olex expects to save $300,000 annually and achieve 100% ROI within 3 years.

Companies in Financial Services are seeing better efficiencies for greater cost reductions. One bank using SOA saw new customer accounts processed in just 1 day instead of 11 days.

How were these companies able to achieve such results? SOA makes it much easier to integrate business units for any industry. The integration of your sales department’s CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system with manufacturing’s ERP  (Enterprise Resource Planning) system with your SCM (Supply Chain Management) system can help reduce inventory costs, which contributes to higher profit margins.

Enjoying your new foundation
Many organisations are adopting SOA to gain flexible IT infrastructures and automation of their business processes.

SOA solutions are collections of business processes that rely on reusable standard interfaces to integrate applications inside a company as well as externally with customers, partners and supplier.

SOA can transform your IT infrastructure into a set of flexible, reusable, standards-based services, and thereby:

• Extend the value of your existing investments
• Support the complete IT lifecycle with a modular approach
• Provide scalability: Start small and grow as fast as the business requires
• Facilitate greater interoperability and portability.

Regardless of whether you're looking to SOA for an enterprise-level project or a tactical technology-level project, the improved flexibility your business gains will help you achieve the competitive advantage needed to remain responsive to market conditions and all your stakeholders.

Further Reading

Learn about 5 SOA projects that can pay for themselves in six months

Download this AMR Report: SOA Survey findings on deployment and plans for the future

Understand your current state of SOA adoption. Our self-assessment tool provides targeted recommendations to help you take the next steps

Learn how SMBs can start integrating systems using SOA and web services

May 2006