A large company found itself handicapped by an ornery snarl of siloed
applications that compromised its agility, performance, and profitability.
Its IT department was constantly behind schedule and over budget in hand
coding point-to-point connectivity among supply chain, financials, CRM, and
other packaged and custom-built legacy applications.
The solution: integrating critical business processes and applications by
adopting a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Internal IT personnel and
consultants engineered a loosely coupled infrastructure, with reusable
services based on XML and standard Web services protocols such as SOAP and
WSDL. Once the system went live, the CFO ran a routine query through his
dashboard. The answer came back:
You forgot the data.
It's a playful fiction, of course, but it illustrates the perils of an SOA
that focuses only on the business ... (more)