One of the primary benefits touted by SOA proponents is the alignment of business with technology. Clearly this should apply equally to the management of SOA deployments as to any other part of the SOA lifecycle and in fact, it can be argued that management is the most important component when it comes to this alignment. Used correctly, SOA management can facilitate the cost effective deployment of new business relationships, the efficient use of existing IT investments and can measure the real value to the organization of SOA itself.
Is SOA management different?
The move to Service Oriented Architecture is the latest step away from the world of isolated applications with limited connectivity. In the SOA world, the enterprise solves new business challenges by combining existing IT assets rather than building afresh: An SOA-based solution consists predominantly of business process definitions which use services already provided by existing applications, and its definition resides outside of any individual application. As a consequence, the number and value of messages flowing between applications increases rapidly as applications and processes must exchange more information and the information exchanged must be richer. Finally, the SOA world is designed to accommodate a much higher level of incremental change reflecting new business requirements.
