All businesses strive to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Innovative solutions become core to a business because they generate opportunities for new revenue and growth. The market adapts quickly, however. As more and more companies adopt what was once an innovative solution, a company loses its differentiation. At that point, the company needs to standardize those processes—making them more efficient to lower costs.

Then, the company must begin to innovate again to achieve a new competitive advantage. This shift from innovation to standardization puts great pressure on businesses, because once a core process ceases to differentiate, it can’t simply be abandoned. It must be managed on an ongoing basis, along with all the other daily fundamental processes. The resulting resource allocation can put a strain on innovation, as businesses strive to move forward.

Impact on IT
Nowhere is this strain more evident than in the IT department. As processes become standardized, the IT department must manage them efficiently and cost-effectively. Simply stated, traditional IT architectures must evolve to facilitate change, while leveraging existing resources.

The problem is, most IT infrastructures aren’t set up that way. They’re built on a vast assortment of applications that were never designed to work together, used by a hodge-podge of widely divergent supply chains that must find a way to collaborate, and run by an ever-shrinking staff. Not surprisingly, stitching new business processes together is increasingly costly and inefficient. To enable business agility, IT organizations must ensure that enterprise applications become high-performance business engines, driving efficiencies, as well as flexible building blocks of future business systems.

Web Services to the Rescue
To provide much-needed flexibility, many IT departments are moving toward Service-Oriented Architecture. SOA is a software model where business functionality is represented through discoverable Web services. Web services, however, are often too granular to be efficient building blocks for enterprise business scenarios across heterogeneous landscapes. The true power of Web services will be unlocked only when enterprise business scenarios can be flexibly enabled from services that are defined at a business level and combine functionality across multiple applications.

A well-designed SOA elevates the design, composition and deployment of Web services to an enterprise level to address enterprise business requirements. An enterprise service is typically a series of Web services combined with simple business logic that can be accessed and used repeatedly to support a particular business process. Aggregating Web services into business-level enterprise services provides more meaningful building blocks for the task of automating enterprise-scale business scenarios.

Enterprise services allow IT organizations to efficiently develop composite applications, which compose functionality and information from existing systems to support new business processes or scenarios. All enterprise services communicate using Web services standards, and can be described in a central repository. Companies can have a cost-effective way to compose innovative new applications by extending existing systems, while maintaining a level of flexibility that makes future process changes cost-effective.

SOA will move IT architectures step-by-step to dramatically higher levels of adaptability and help companies move closer to the vision of the real-time enterprise. Thus, the promise of SOA is twofold— facilitating business innovation while leveraging existing resources.

Facilitating Business Innovation
SOA separates the definition of business processes from their underlying application implementation. Using simple modeling tools, business managers can define new or adapt existing business processes and implement them as enterprise services that can be published, shared and reused across businesses, even with external partners. Once the building blocks of the businesses are exposed in a way that enables repeat usage, they can be quickly modified to adapt to changing business needs.

Leveraging Existing Resources
SOA also helps get more value out of existing resources through standardization. Frequently, IT infrastructures develop from the acquisition and integration of stand-alone applications and systems that are expensive to maintain. Using ESA, IT departments can build bridges between different applications and systems to make use of the functionality locked within them.

Driving Adoption of Enterprise Services
A key strength and challenge with SOA-based systems is that it requires collaboration between the many people who are responsible for various functional areas within an enterprise. Line of Business and IT leaders, IT architects and project managers will all be involved at different stages, depending on a project’s scope and timetable. The Systems Integrator or Software vendor’s Professional Services Organization will be involved as well. And depending on the scope, partners, customers and suppliers will be involved. With such a diverse and constantly changing cast of characters, it is vital that an adoption program be created to serve as a valuable tool for outlining responsibilities, determining priorities, and keeping track of timelines.

A well-designed program must be flexible and iterative; stake holders can use a single step or even a single enabler within a given step, they can address the steps in any order, and repeat the various steps and procedures as many times as they wish to support diverse implementations or evolving strategies.

Conclusion
IT organizations can help their companies drive sustainable, profitable growth. A well-designed Services Oriented Architecture can provide IT organizations the tool to drive significant value by supporting innovation and standardization in a single environment. With SOA, IT organizations can enable new business processes quickly which will help differentiate companies from the competition while leveraging existing IT assets and thereby saving costs.

Nimish Mehta is the senior manager at SAP