Service-oriented computing: Goals and benefits

This excerpt from "SOA: Principles of Service Design" lays out seven goals of service-oriented computing and talks about how businesses can benefit from this technology.

SOA: Principles of Service Design

It is very important to establish why both vendor and end-user communities within the IT industry are going through the trouble of adopting the service-oriented computing platform and embracing all of the change that comes with it.

The vision behind service-oriented computing is extremely ambitious and therefore also very attractive to any organization interested in truly improving the effectiveness of its IT enterprise. A set of common goals and benefits has emerged to form this vision. These establish a target state for an enterprise that successfully adopts service-orientation.

The upcoming set of sections describe each of these strategic SOA goals and benefits (also displayed in Figure 3.26):

Figure 3.26 The seven identified goals are inter-related and can be further categorized into two groups: strategic goals and resulting benefits. Increased organization agility, increased ROI, and reduced IT burden are concrete benefits resulting from the attainment of the remaining four goals.

service-oriented computing goals

  • Increased Intrinsic Interoperability
  • Increased Federation
  • Increased Vendor Diversification Options
  • Increased Business and Technology Domain Alignment
  • Increased ROI
  • Increased Organizational Agility
  • Reduced IT Burden

It is beneficial to understand the significance of these goals and benefits prior to studying and applying service-orientation so that design principles are consistently viewed within a strategic context.

An important message of this book in general is that there is a concrete link between successfully applying service-orientation design principles and successfully attaining these specific goals and benefits (a point which is further detailed in Chapter 16).

Use the following table of contents to navigate to chapter excerpts.


SOA: Principles of Service Design
 Home: Service-oriented computing and SOA: Introduction
  1: Design fundamentals: Design characteristics
  2: Design fundamentals: Design principles
  3: Design fundamentals: Design pattern and design pattern language
  4: Design fundamentals: Design standard
  5: Design fundamentals: Best practices
  6: Introduction to service-oriented computing
  7: Service oriented architecture
  8: Service compositions
  9: Understanding service oriented computing elements
  10: Entity services
  11: Web services and service oriented computing
  12: Service inventory blueprints
  13: Service-oriented analysis and service modeling
  14: Service-oriented design
  15: Goals and benefits of service-oriented computing
  16: Increased intrinsic interoperability
  17: Increased federation
  18: Increased vendor diversification options
  19: Increased business and technology domain alignment
  20: Increased ROI
  21: Increased organizational agility
  22: Reduced IT burden

ABOUT THE BOOK:   
 
SOA: Principles of Service Design is dedicated to service engineering and establishing service-orientation as a design paradigm. This hands-on manual for service design establishes concrete links between specific service-orientation design principles and the strategic goals and benefits associated with SOA. Purchase the book from Amazon.com.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:   
 
Thomas Erl is the world's top-selling SOA author, Series Editor of the "Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series and editor of The SOA Magazine. His books have become international bestsellers and have been formally endorsed by senior members of major software organizations such as IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. He is the founder of SOA Systems Inc., a company specializing in SOA training, certification and strategic consulting services with a vendor-agnostic focus.


 

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