August 2004 Cutter Benchmark Review: Business Direction Is Critical to SOA Success

by Michael Rosen

The business principle behind SOA is to build up a collection of small, independent services that can be quickly and easily combined in a variety of ways into different, higher-level business services. This is what gives an enterprise the agility to offer new services and to respond to competitive pressures. We want to use the SOA to create business value and help achieve our business strategy, but to do this we need to understand what our strategy is and make sure that we are creating the right services (building blocks) to achieve that strategy.