<<A survey
<http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/soa-talk/survey-sees-soa-strength/>of
the audiences at TechTarget Application Development Group member sites
proves some points that I have been making about SOA for a long time.
First, the most common entry point to SOA is integration. "Frye writes
that today's SOA projects are largely about integration. Survey results
show that the top benefits organizations hope to achieve with SOA are
improved data integration (32%), enable legacy application integration
(32%) and integrated disparate department applications (23%)."
The next common entry point, and one that I have argued is the next
level of maturity from an application perspective, is business process
management. "Meanwhile, there is interest and uptick in Business Process
Management with 29.7% of respondents marking BPM as one of the critical
areas for their organization's technology efforts. At the same time,
35.8% of respondents counted Business Process Management software among
the types of infrastructure software currently used, with 38% planning
to use it in the future."
And finally, SOA definitely is not dead! "She notes that SOA use is
strong. Among the survey respondents, 49% said their organization has
one or more SOA projects under way, and 60% characterize their current
or future SOA projects as enterprise level as opposed to
departmental/divisional level (21%), or single, isolated projects (19%)."
This is just the common sense approach to using SOA to improve
application integration, thereby reducing maintenance and support costs
within IT and reducing duplicate data entry and errors for the
end-users. And using SOA to improve business processes to reduce labor
costs and improve productivity is the next step after integration -
end-to-end process automation most often requires integrated systems.
Ten years after I started working in this space we are back to the
reality and hard work of making SOA pay for itself in the same ways this
all started - the integration of distributed systems and improvement of
business processes. This is SOA blocking and tackling and there is still
a great deal of it to be done.>>
You can read this at:
http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/the-soa-blog/soa-survey-points-to-practical-approaches-30900
Gervas
