SOA is a term developed for IT architecture. It's an equally valid concept for organisational architecture.High level it's about creating a number of service oriented components that can be called upon to deliver services. It goes nicely with business process management systems.
Think of a system that takes an applications for a loan, calls out to a credit checking tool, get a result and move to the next step, calls out to a document generator and produces a letter of offer, gets a result and then proceeds to the next step. That's service orientation.
Now transfer this idea to business process design and organisational design - business architecture.
Tom Peters wrote a piece called The PSF is Everything! a few years ago calling on departments and teams everywhere to become service oriented in order to support an organisation's quest to be excellent. I recommend reading it for a bit of TP style inspiration, but also to get the idea around the importance of taking on a service oriented approach to teams and departments in order to do well at the big picture level.
The same principles apply to business as in IT: Loosely coupled, easy interface business units that provide a reliable and high quality service make for a more agile and efficient business. These feature provide for less rework, less errors and waste, and more working together as a team to face whatever monster we are up against this month/quarter/year.
Let me list out these key points for you;
Think of a system that takes an applications for a loan, calls out to a credit checking tool, get a result and move to the next step, calls out to a document generator and produces a letter of offer, gets a result and then proceeds to the next step. That's service orientation.
Now transfer this idea to business process design and organisational design - business architecture.
Tom Peters wrote a piece called The PSF is Everything! a few years ago calling on departments and teams everywhere to become service oriented in order to support an organisation's quest to be excellent. I recommend reading it for a bit of TP style inspiration, but also to get the idea around the importance of taking on a service oriented approach to teams and departments in order to do well at the big picture level.
The same principles apply to business as in IT: Loosely coupled, easy interface business units that provide a reliable and high quality service make for a more agile and efficient business. These feature provide for less rework, less errors and waste, and more working together as a team to face whatever monster we are up against this month/quarter/year.
Let me list out these key points for you;
- Loosely coupled
- Easy interface
- High quality
When you are designing the future state of your organisation, what, as an analyst or change agent, can you do to improve things?
