SOA = Service Oriented Approach
I had a long chat last week with Alef on the IT (application) infrastructure of a small healthcare company.
He made some interesting remarks that changed my view towards service oriented architecture. It is not only a technological solution, it is an approach towards servicing the organization as a whole. With that view in mind, you’ll find that agility – be able to change along – becomes more and more important, not only from a process development perspective (like SCRUM) but for the organization as a whole.
In my situation, there is a debate about to happen on old versus new, monolitic application versus services, screen oriented versus process oriented. And the major question remains, why do you need the Service Oriented Approach ?
Benefits of the Service Oriented Approach
- Grow slow, get experienced – create oversee-able risk. Grow gradually and minimize the risk.
- Grow fast, services and work on them has the option to scale.
- Adapt to change
- Keep your culture (important in mergers (of technology or organization))
- Don’t be a hostage of your big time vendor (at least you have the option with this approach)
Drawbacks of the Service Oriented Approach
- The tailor made services require more time of both the development team and the customer.
- There is continuous deployment, system management remains busy with this approach
- Most IT is constructed in projects, The agile, service oriented approach is a never ending cycle of adoption.
During the time to organize an agile, service oriented platform from a ICT management perspective, I found the opposite interests hard to unite.