The only constant in today’s business environment is change. Businesses that continuously foresee change and adapt quickly will gain market share and increased growth. In our ever growing global business environment change is driven by data in regards to collecting, maintaining, verifying and distributing data.  Companies today are made and broken over data. Would anyone still use Google if they did not have one of the most accurate search indexes on the internet? No, because their value is in their data and the quality of their data. Due to the increasing focus on data, companies have been adopting new methodologies for gaining more control over their data while attempting to reduce the costs of maintaining it. In addition, companies are also trying to reduce the time it takes to analyze data in regards to various market forces to foresee changes prior to them actually occurring.  

Benefits of Adopting SOA

• Services can be maintained separately from other services and applications so that a change in one service will only affect itself and client services or applications.
• The advent of services allows for system functionality to be distributed across a network or multiple networks. The costs associated with maintain business functionality is much higher in standard application development over SOA due to the fact that one Services can be maintained and shared to other applications instead of multiple instances of business functionality being duplicated via hard coding in to several applications.
• When multiple applications use a single service for a specific business function then the all of the data being processed will be consistent in terms of quality and accuracy through the applications.

Disadvantages of Adopting SOA

• Increased initial costs and timelines are associated with SOA due to the fact that services need to be created as well as applications need to be modified to call the services
• In order for an SOA project to be successful the project must obtain company and management support in order to gain the proper exposure, funding, and attention. If SOA is new to a company they must also support the proper training in order for the project to be designed, and implemented correctly.

References:

Tews, R. (2007). Beyond IT: Exploring the Business Value of SOA. SOA Magazine Issue XI.