Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

SOA Delivers Agility, Effectivenesss and Efficiency

Agility, effectiveness and efficiency are the modern cornerstones of business, government and defense.  These key goals are the basis for much of the transformation in the way we architect our enterprise and information systems. SOA has emerged as a key enabler.

There has been some confusion in the industry as to the positioning of SOA as a technology or business architecture.  SOA, as DAT approaches it, is both a business and a technical approach. The SOA approach to organizing an enterprise focuses on agility by treating customers, suppliers and separable parts of the enterprise as a network of services.  The SOA approach to technology helps realize these enterprise services with an agile, interoperable and modular technology base.  The combination provides a path for transforming the enterprise.

Achieving Business Value with SOA

To achieve pervasive business value the architecture of services focuses on how business and technical services work together to achieve business, government or military goals.  The focus of architecture is not on “a service” but the network of services that serve a community or organization.  SOA is a path to architecting this network of services, incrementally transforming both the enterprise and enterprise systems.

DAT has developed an approach to Systems and Sytems-of-Sytems that provides a business and technical framework for achieving agility, effectiveness and efficiency with Service Oriented Architecture.  We have documented our approach in a White Paper entitled "The Architecture of Services: Achieving Business Value with SOA"

In this paper, we examine the foundation for what SOA is and why it is important.  We then explore what constitutes a quality SOA, how it can be achieved uning MDA and the business value it provides.

SOA as a Design Style

SOA is a style of designing business services that can be flexibly composed to support changing business processes, by maximizing reuse of existing service implementations and easing the implementation of new services. In SOA, the idea of an application or system is viewed as a composition of independent services which can be in-sourced or out-sourced across different internal lines of business and external value chain partners.

DAT and SOA

SOA is one of the cornerstones of the DAT Development Methodology. As such, we are very active in its standardization and development.

As a vice chair of the Open Group's Architecture Forum, DAT is active in the Open Group SOA Working Group undertaking such projects as SOA Maturity Models, SOA Governance and an Ontology for SOA. DAT is also active in the OMG's SOA Special Interest Group working in areas that include standards development in "Software Service Profile and Metamodel 'SOA' RFP".

DAT is also involved in an industry wide "SOA Harmonization" project that is attempting to ensure that those Industry Consortia and Standards Bodies that are woirking in the SOA space are communicating with each other to minimize duplicative efforts and ensure that the "Industry" is sending a consistant message to its SOA users and practitioners. The Open Group, OASIS, OMG, the SOA Alliance and others are active participants in this effort.