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It is clear in today’s highly complex business world that the race will be won by the agile. Companies that leverage information technology (IT) to streamline and automate business processes, or who leverage IT to drive innovation will gain competitive advantage.
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) promises to better align business objectives and IT activities through a flexible and modular architecture that provides organizations with insight into business processes and their associated IT resources across the enterprise. By taking a standards-based approach to building, deploying and maintaining applications, and the creation of reusable, shared services, businesses can dramatically improve their business process agility and lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) of their IT assets.
Companies have substantial investments in legacy application infrastructure. Frequently, that legacy investment includes duplicated functionality and siloed systems in multiple business units, product lines, sales channels and geographies. Whether they arose as shortcuts that allowed accelerated entry into a new market, or the roll-out of a new product, or from the effect of mergers and acquisitions, they are now costly overhead that can no longer be justified and must be cut back. All of this duplication, the lack of integration, has become increasingly expensive to maintain, impedes agility and importantly, drains resources that could otherwise be used for innovation and other strategic purposes. The SOA approach is focused on eliminating this duplication and replacing it with services that are reusable across the enterprise, thereby unlocking information and the business logic surrounding it and allowing them to be wielded as a tool for competitive advantage.
Yet questions prevail as to whether SOA is living up to its promises. Are businesses leveraging SOA and gaining agility, cost-containment, innovation or strategic alignment? Or instead are technology-focused approaches failing to attain the business-oriented goals that SOA has promised, and purely resulting in the replacement of previous technologies with newer ones?
The success of service-oriented architecture (SOA) will ultimately be determined by its business value, and BearingPoint is well positioned for this business focus.
-- The Forrester Wave™: North American SOA Integration, Q3 2006, September 2006
“SOA is another step toward bringing business and IT together to help organizations improve their processes,” said Hemant Ramachandra, BearingPoint Managing Director.
“All along, though, we’ve recognized that it’s like opening the Pandora’s Box of your enterprise. If you’re not careful, there will be unintended consequences.”
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