Michael Blechar

Business agility requires shifting to a service-oriented mentality, enabled by service-oriented architectures. However, unless organizations also shift their people, processes and technologies to service-oriented development of applications (SODA), SOA will fail to achieve its anticipated benefits.

The emergence of Web services and service-oriented development of applications (SODA) provides a major boost for enterprise agility. Without SODA, efforts to bring service-oriented architecture (SOA) into mainstream use will fail, and business process improvement projects will find process agility constrained by the organization’s traditional application architectures. SOA and SODA support the rapid composition of new service-oriented business applications (SOBAs), including software as a service (SaaS) from sources outside the enterprise. SOBAs will increase the need for loosely integrated processes, a hallmark of the SODA concept. Because SODA is a hybrid of other application archetypes, it requires significant people, process and technology changes to be successfully adopted.

In the newly published research note “Revisiting The Definition and Realities of SODA*” we examine a variety of issues ranging from the definition of SODA to assessing the readiness of an organization to take on SODA and implications of how SODA changes applications development. Many of these changes are explored in the companion research notes “The Role Of SW Components and Building Blocks in AD*”, “Use Component-Based Development Methods to Maximize SOA Success*” and “Software As A Service Component Development Challenges*”.

To effectively use SOAs, organizations must shift from traditional forms of building siloed applications based on engineering principles to SODA building shared services across business processes that are deployed incrementally into the application ecosystem in a more integrated fashion. This is not simply a technology problem, but also a paradigm shift requiring substantial changes involving people and process.

*Available to Gartner clients or for a fee

Submit a Comment »

Category: Uncategorized     Tags:

Share

Tweet