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Governance: The True Force Needed for SOA
Unless you're an IT professional who's been on an extended sabbatical to remote jungles, you've heard the buzzword SOA, or Services-Oriented Architecture. If someone asked you to describe what SOA is, you might struggle a bit, since providing a clear definition of it has never been core strength of SOA vendors or industry magazines. However, SOA--without a doubt--is a critical enabler for businesses moving forward.
SOA, simply defined, is the ability to abstract business services across a business value chain (internal and external) so that an application can reference those business services predictably and through standard access mechanisms wherever they may are built. Services can be referenced by applications inside of a single corporate ecosystem or across corporations.
The beauty of these services is that they are completely independent of technology; services can abstract mainframe, client-server, Java or .NET applications. To crystallize the concept of SOA, let me give an easy example. Let's say that an insurance company had a mainframe application that was the master record for claims. Everything that needed to be known about those claims was in that mainframe in a legacy database. New applications are built and each requires some information about claims. Companies are acquired and their claims need to be included as part of the parent companies master lookup…
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