<<Service oriented architecture (SOA) technologies and approaches are typically thought of as IT-focused solutions. Essentially, SOA is an elegant (hopefully) technical solution to IT problems, not business problems.
However, at the same time that SOA is really a technical issue, many organizations are implementing, or considering implementing, SOA solutions in response to specific business needs -- such as the requirement for more flexible and agile IT solutions, more dynamic business processes, and faster time-to-market for applications. As a result, SOA implementations are, in the end, driven by a combination of business and technical drivers. Since SOA is generally considered a technical issue, some IT organizations and leaders try to keep SOA concepts and ideas within the IT realm. In fact, some SOA advocates suggest that it's better not to bother the business community with SOA-instead, just let the IT community focus on it. However, there's another approach, one that a number of organizations are having good success with. And that's the opposite approach. Instead of hiding SOA concepts from the business community, some IT organizations are stepping up and involving the business community in their SOA rollout -- not just be keeping them in the loop or revealing all the nitty-gritty details of how SOA services work, but by helping the rest of the organization understand the value of services and how the SOA process works. In other words, articulating the value of SOA to business executives, from a business perspective, in language they understand. The more a business community reuses a service, the more they'll realize the benefits of the architecture. So it's important that both IT and business leaders can speak the same (high-level) language. Let the business leaders understand how much the company can save by not doing the same redundant development, or how much more value (or speed) can be obtained by standardizing business intelligence capabilities or services. In effect, educating the business executives is a key component of a good SOA program, because it gets buy-in support and helps the business leaders understand how the IT group's SOA initiative helps achieve their specific business objectives. When this approach is done right, in many cases you'll find that the business personnel will actually start to help IT identify areas and opportunities where services can be reused.>> You can read this at: http://www.ebizq.net/hot_topics/soa/features/10486.html Gervas
