After doing SOA implementation for many years, I have to review the topic of SOA business value. SOA is a business model, an architectural method, and a methodology. And where is the real business value of implementing SOA? How many companies have real business value after implementing SOA? At least from the perspective of the implementation effect of SOA in recent years, SOA still has a long way to go before it can truly reflect the realization of business value and realize business agility.
In the early stage of implementing SOA, it is often just an extension of EAI enterprise application integration, including SOA itself is only a further development of message middleware. From this level, it is difficult for SOA to exert its real business value, and the core business value of SOA must reflect the accumulation of reusable asset libraries and business agility.
SOA itself is an architectural methodology. This methodology is not a negation of the existing structure-oriented and object-oriented methods, but an extension. The focus of this extension lies in process-driven IT, business-driven architecture, end-to-end From the process of the terminal to the business componentization and service, and from the reusable business components and services to quickly build business applications.
After the SOA architecture method comes out, we will pay more attention to business process sorting, business architecture and business modeling when building IT systems, which is also the basis for truly realizing business and technology decoupling. rapid service composition and orchestration. In the whole method, the business component itself occupies a very important position. The business component provides business capabilities, and the business capabilities themselves are provided in the form of services. This architectural method must be introduced into the system, and this method is adopted from the beginning of the construction of a system to build applications, including end-to-end process analysis, business modeling and business components, service components and service identification, cross-component CRUD analysis of data, service interaction between components, etc.
For SOA transformation and integration of legacy systems, it is often difficult to carry out full SOA transformation of existing historical systems, and only SOA service transformation of existing system integration interfaces can be carried out. Analyze and identify the existing business components and business capabilities of each business system. It is also difficult to follow our top-to-bottom end-to-end process analysis and modeling ideas, which naturally leads to the inability to effectively identify business components and business services, and subsequent service orchestration and process orchestration are more difficult to truly implement. It is important to know that the focus of BPEL service orchestration is business services, not data interfaces and data services.
Business Value 1 - Forming a true service asset library
It can be said that forming a truly reusable service catalog and service asset library is an important business value embodiment of SOA implementation. SOA has been emphasizing the granularity of services and the reusability of services. Every reuse of services reduces the construction of IT systems. and implementation costs. The service asset library is to extract the reusable business capabilities of various business systems and provide them in the form of services.
When we are building a new business system, we prioritize which service assets or capabilities can be borrowed, and which functions we need to build and develop completely. The more services and assets that can be reused, the less cost and time we can build an IT system.
Service assets themselves are business components and business capabilities. Users or newly constructed business systems will not pay attention to the business system that provides this capability (transparency of SOA itself). This kind of service itself is coarse-grained, and the implementation mechanism is completely black box. of. SOA itself focuses on providing this service catalog, rather than implementing the service itself. If SOA and cloud computing are combined, then it will not only generate this capability, but also provide this service.
The service asset library is the capability provision center, and each existing business system supports this capability provision center. Each business system extracts the reusable capabilities and registers them on the ESB enterprise service bus. In order to better provide such services and capabilities for ESBs, the requirements for componentized and modular development of various business systems are naturally higher.
Business Value 2 - Business Agility and Efficiency
Changes in business processes or businesses can be quickly adapted through BPEL service orchestration adjustment, which is the basis for our talk about SOA's ability to achieve business agility. But this road is often a long way to go. The realization of a brand-new business function can be realized completely through service composition, orchestration, and process orchestration. This is our expectation, but it is quite difficult.
The first is whether our service asset library is complete enough? There are two issues involved here. One is the identification of business services rather than simple data services. It is difficult to use data services for service orchestration. The second is whether the service identification process itself starts with process analysis, identifies business components, and then analyzes the interaction between process-driven components, so that the analyzed services can truly support bottom-up assembly.
Secondly, to realize the rapid construction of business, it is far from enough to simply use BPEL. After the BPM business process management and BPMN2.0 were launched, this aspect has taken a step forward. A smooth transition from business process modeling to IT implementation can be partially achieved. But there is another key problem here, namely the rule engine, which cannot be used for rapid application development, and the process orchestration and assembly are just a bubble, and it is difficult to truly implement. Having been exposed to too many rapid development platforms, enterprise-level applications are not simple additions, deletions, modifications, and inspections. If the rules cannot be stripped and reused, there is no need to reuse the complex business process itself.
Breaking the boundaries of business systems and solving the chimney-like silo structure is not a simple service integration, but a process integration across systems. At this time, the business system sinks into a capability unit, and what floats above is the process and application that can be assembled and orchestrated. The stronger the concept of siloed business systems, the more difficult it is to drive business agility.
How to implement the problem
The problem of landing is also a problem that we consider more. No matter how perfect the methodology is, if it cannot be landed, it will only be a castle in the air. The process of landing itself is a process of overall planning and distribution implementation. The better the foundation is laid in the early stage, the easier the subsequent implementation will be. For the specific implementation, the following aspects are mainly considered:
1. Process-driven business architecture ideas, across business departments and system boundaries, to further analyze and identify business services.
2. Integrate existing service assets to form a reusable service asset library
3. Weakening the concept of each business system, the business system changes into a business capability unit, and the service capability is integrated into the ESB
4. Extract the reusable parts of each business system, further sink and centralize, and form a PAAS cloud platform within the enterprise
5. Select appropriate new business systems or business functions, use tools such as BPM, and build applications with the help of existing service capabilities
6. Gradually migrate traditional business functions and business units