Operational Systems

Oriented Architectures (SOA) are valued more and more by companies in all industries and sizes. This paper explains SOA briefly and presents approaches for migrating to an SOA in ‘real life’. We will discuss how SOA design methods and proven software reengineering technology can be combined in order to support a company’s SOA adoption roadmap. 1. SOA Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a business-centric IT architectural approach that supports integrating business as linked, repeatable business tasks, or services. Web Services provide a standardized, cost-effective implementation of such services (but this is not mandatory for an SOA). The services that a company wants to expose (internally or to the market) must be commonly understood by the business and the IT departments (see central ‘layer ’ in Figure 1). Then the business requirements can be implemented with a view to services, which also form major elements of the business processes to support: The services are invoked where they are required in the process; they can also be accessed directly from consumers (e.g. via a portal)