A Perspective on Emerging SOA Best Practices

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) practices are intended to create an agile, integrated information technology (IT) infrastructure that is scalable, reliable, and can rapidly respond to an organization’s changing needs by employing loosely coupled and dynamic services. An SOA approach enables business needs to drive an organization’s strategic IT decisions. As a result, SOA allows a business to become more efficient in meeting its current business needs and more agile in meeting future (and possibly unknown) business needs. It is important to note, however, that an SOA is neither a panacea nor something that can be purchased. There are challenges with employing SOA techniques effectively, some of which are explored in this paper.