The Open Group, the vendor-neutral technology consortium, has published the Service-Orientated Architecture (SOA) for Business Technology Guide. The new offering provides a playbook and reference model for businesses to successfully implement digital transformation in the era of continuous business evolution, APIs, and the cloud.
Nikhil Kumar, President, Applied Technology Solutions, Inc. (ApTSi) commented: “The SOA for Business Technology Guide lays the foundation for executives looking to navigate the process of digital evolution, where digital transformation has become a constant. Crucially, it is not a technology silver bullet. Instead it reaches beyond IT, giving leaders the tools needed to develop a roadmap for digital transformation, creating the capability based, service-oriented enterprise of the future.”
The Guide helps decision-makers address business, regulatory, and technical changes, which enables them to define their organisations in terms of metrics, business function, and process. At the same time, it allows IT leaders to translate that into actionable implementation.
Sundar Ramanathan, Co-Chair of the SOA for Business Technology Guide project commented: “API-centric cloud and microservices are changing the way businesses operate, and with this, the role of IT. Service-orientation is no longer solely a technology play, but also a business play. While the existing SOA Reference Architecture and SOA standards from The Open Group delivered the basis for modern service-oriented technology enablement, these were largely adopted by IT teams. The Guide provides the vital link between the business vision, strategy, execution, and IT implementation, extending the scope of SOA practice and, importantly, connecting it to the business world.”
The SOA for Business Technology Guide
The Open Group SOA for Business Technology Guide is a Guide for the adoption of service-orientation as a way of structuring and doing business. By utilising the Guide, business leaders, IT executives, and enterprise architects can manage the challenges that arise from constant digital transformation and changing drivers. It allows them to seamlessly handle the transition into agile, modern organisations that are able to operate in a capability-based, service-oriented, digital world and provides a framework to successfully navigate metrics, cloud-driven APIs, and continuous change.
Delivering a vendor-neutral approach, the Guide helps bridge the gap between enterprise board-level score cards and departmental execution models. By utilising examples, a structural framework, and a process framework, it allows business executives to answer questions around measurement, adoption, and implementation. Simultaneously, it enables IT leadership to map business objectives to actionable IT metrics and leverage existing standards such as the SOA Reference Architecture.
