SOA and EA

Blog 9

=======

Other activities which are similar to enterprise architecture and Business-IT alignment.

SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) is an activity similar to EA. The concept of SOA is announced by Gartner in 1996. SOA concept supplies a kind of Architecture style, which can simplifies the business and inter-operability between different business units. It can strengthen the connection between the units, thus identify capability of the enterprise quickly and avoid duplicate capability among different business fields, departments, and units.

SOA focus on building application system with more flexibility, which is of importance in to day complex and high-speed developing business environment.

In the implementation of SOA, because of the finer granularity it brings, the complexity unavoidably happens in the total system. Therefore, there are some aspect should be think of in the implementation:

1. The understanding of the relationship between technology groups and service groups

2. Tracking business to IT system

3. Platform and inter-operability

4. Performance visualization and optimization

Layer interaction in SOA

If these aspects cannot be solved appropriately, the SOA project will suffer considerable risk in the following aspects:

1. Cannot evaluate the project correctly. This may lead to overspending in infrastructure or low-quality service.

2. Lead to islands in services according to the implement details, thus cause the IT architecture fragile and great amount maintain cost.

3. Cannot help the potential consumers identify the reusable services, thus cause the duplication in services, lack of visibility and complexity increase in integration.

It is a good way to develop EA in the company to ensure the implementation of SOA.

As to SOA, EA provide a series of tools and technologies which can help build relationship between business-dominant SOA and developer-dominant SOA, thus solve the problems SOA is facing:

1. EA links the IT capital and business in clear and quantified ways. With amplified context, these models can effectively support evaluation and project portfolio management.

2. EA defines principles, framework, patterns and standards, ensures the inter-operability and reusability.

3. EA links different opinions of single business project among different departments, provide a consistent model.

The EA uses a kind of unified, standardized, broad language, linking the strategy, vision, motivation, business ability gaps, and etc. All of these would be described in detail in the architecture documentation, with which can easily track, analyze and certify the support degree to the business.