Service Oriented Architecture Field Guide for Executives

2.7. BECOMING SERVICE ORIENTED

All businesses are inherently service oriented. Employees offer services by performing certain tasks. Machines manufacture goods. Software applications store and offer information. The organization as a whole provides certain services to its customers and partners.

When IT recognizes this pattern and adopts service as the foundation of everything a company does, it becomes service oriented. SOA, then, encourages a business to be process oriented and IT to be service oriented.

What, then, is the relationship between business process and service? A business process is a sequence of activities. Employees, machines, and software systems perform these activities. They are called service providers, or, in short, services. Each service is capable of performing a few tasks. A business process acts as a conductor in an orchestra and asks the service providers to perform specific tasks. And in this way, services become the building blocks of a business.

In SOA, a business process literally runs as software. This is known as business process automation. An automated business process is also known as orchestration. Essentially, the orchestration software does the coordination of tasks that eventually complete a business goal. For the first time, key business operations are overseen, controlled, and managed by a piece of software. Even the most complex operations, involving suppliers, partners, government, human beings, and software, can be coordinated in this ...