<<A recent front-page article by Jeff Feinman
<http://www.sdtimes.com/author/jfeinman.aspx> in SD Times, "Bottom Line:
Software had better pay", warns that economic conditions mandate any
funded project better begin paying back immediately. Supply chain
management and automation improvements are cited as types of projects
that continue to be funded during this economic down turn. Automation
in particular is an area ripe with opportunities aligned with
service-oriented architecture (SOA). Even more attractive is the fact
that many automation opportunities are focused on improving a small
number of business processes. This means that a project has a
manageable scope. Project costs are more predictable, thus return on
investment (ROI) is more definite. Projects with predictable and
immediate ROI are much more attractive than those with fuzzy costs ROI,
thus are more likely to get funded when budgets are tight.
Why is automation well-aligned with SOA? Since the early days of SOA
hype, the main goal of SOA has been to achieve business agility through
the organization of computing functions as interchangeable parts, called
services. A business process is implemented by orchestrating services
to accomplish the goals of the process. Services are designed to be
reusable, so a particular service invocation, like "Create new
customer", can participate in many different business processes. Most
importantly, new business processes can largely be orchestrated from a
comprehensive library of existing services. Traditional development
cycles of 12-18 months are replaced with the creation of a new
orchestration, a process that may take just a few weeks.
While most companies are years away from having a comprehensive library
of services, automation projects present an attractive "delivery
vehicle" to begin or continue growing the service inventory. Automation
is the processes of exploiting computer resources to augment or replace
manual processes traditionally performed by humans. Architected in a
service-oriented manner, a process or orchestration environment provides
a visual tool to design and manage a business process. Activities in
the process generally are implemented by services. Candidate tools for
the process layer include ActiveEndpoints <http://www.activevos.com/> ,
Apache ODE <http://ode.apache.org/> , and ProcessMaker
<http://www.processmaker.com/>. Tools in the services layer would of
course include XAware <http://www.xaware.org> for information-oriented
services, and Eclipse-based tools <http://www.eclipse.org/stp/> when
custom-coded services are required.
So, while times are tough and budgets are tight, development work
continues in key areas. Companies can't afford to stop reacting to
market demands or improving operations. Service-oriented implementation
strategies will conitinue to play a key role in the important work
currently underway. And, if architected properly, service-oriented
projects help lay the groundwork for more strategic benefits in the
future.>>
You can read this at: http://soapragmatist.blogspot.com/
Gervas
