Don’t you agree to this? Well the usual suspect of selling SOA to the business is flexibility. This is an advantage of a Service Oriented strategy, but this doesn’t create a big round of applause at the business. Why not? Because IT promised this for decades already, that they have found the holy grail of flexibility. Sadly enough these promises are hardly made up by IT, so give the “business” a break by not buying in to this beautiful story/strategy right away.
Why do I consider that Compliancy is a key selling point of SOA to the business? Traceability. I have been working as a business consultant in defining and re-engineering processes at big companies. These were all major projects, but the problem with the description of these processes in beautiful tools like ARIS, BWISE, etc. have one major drawback. It is only designed and not implemented. For example if we model that insurance claim above 10.000 Euro needs clearance of a team-manager, this looks very good…-on paper-. No-one can claim that all the claims are really handled this way (that is under the assumption that no workflow tool is in place that will execute this business rule). There are dozens of these type of business rules that are compliance/regulatory needed, and are signed off in the statement of the CEO in a control statement.
In my vision it is not wise to implement SOA only as an “integration”-technology, but implement it holistically with also a BPM solution “on-top”, that orchestrates the business process/flow. A key function of this BPM solution is traceability, what you model as a business process by a business analyst, is also executed! There is no escape or work-around possible, everything is routed and can be traces afterwards. So the CEO can sign-off his control statement with no (or less) second thoughts….
Please react, I am only posing some views and I am eager to learn J
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