Redefining Enterprise Architecture with SOA

Governments in the Middle East are driving for change. The challenge for them, to do more with less, is a constant battle. Their IT infrastructure needs to face the complexities of applications, processes, inefficiencies, and security concerns and balance these, in most  cases within tight budgets. In an environment of constant change, the right technology choice can meet these requirements without a slow down in productivity.

Infrastructure problems associated with data and legacy applications can be alleviated with Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). The value of SOA really relates to an organisation's  ability to change and support a culture of change, and to allow for improvements in information sharing across the organisation. Government agencies and departments can no longer justify unnecessary duplication of infrastructure or disparate systems that don’t communicate with each other. SOA is creating a tremendous shift in department processes by re-defining architecture strategy and requiring significant changes in resource allocation. Its mandate is to build an enterprise architecture that reshapes applications as services is a leading priority for government agencies. Open source-based SOA tools allow them to make the business process changes they need to at significantly lower cost than proprietary offerings with the added benefit of the constant software improvements inherent in the Open Source development model.

Because of the growing popularity and availability of the Internet, users increasingly prefer to conduct their government-related business on-line, rather than having to travel to a government office and queue to be attended to. Many government departments have developed on-line services and processes for conducting government business. Web services combined with SOA represent the design blueprint for the IT infrastructure that governments need, now and in the future. Together, they offer a standards-based approach to making IT dynamically interoperable, dramatically improving efficiency and response times, and providing real-time information for better decision making. The question is no longer whether to implement SOA. The question is how to implement SOA to maximize the benefits within an organization.

SOA leverages open standards to provide a standard way to represent and interact with application functionality, enabling reuse of services, while focusing on improving organisational agility. It also creates new applications from existing components and helps to leverage services inside and outside the government departments, quickly, easily and at lower costs.

Inefficiency and lack of responsiveness is another key challenge faced by government departments. Government IT executives struggle to increase the utilization of their dispersed IT assets. Most IT environments require the purchase of additional hardware for new applications, while installed hardware sometimes runs at only 5% to 10% utilization. This low utilization adds hardware costs, team management costs, and complexity to IT operations. Built on open standards, SOA provides the strategic IT direction these departments need to become more agile and responsive.

Another key tool, Virtualisation optimises hardware utilisation, letting services and multiple business processes use the same resources in an optimal fashion. Red Hat’s Advanced Platform, for example, takes advantage of advances in operating system virtualisation, helping customers reduce costs and allowing them to refocus resources to the application and business process automations that differentiate their business. Integrated virtualisation helps IT assets better respond to peak workloads and peak demand for specific services and business processes.

Security management and data protection are critical to government agencies. SOA helps government agencies integrate security tools into their SOA architecture. The integration of formerly separate technology systems must consider proper management and protection of shared information and content across all applications and platforms. Open Source provides the most simplified and scalable solutions in the market today. These are built around industry standards and are backed by the open-source community for providing choice and industry leading value to businesses at an overall lower cost of ownership.

Business processes often run much less efficiently than they should, thanks to the friction of unnecessary manual steps, awkward inter-system communication, and the inability to manage rapid change. Business process friction saps a business’ ability to differentiate and compete in their market space. SOA integrates flexible and reusable services that can be rapidly deployed and modified to relieve business process friction, improve business agility, and accelerate time-to-deliver on business requirements.

But despite the potential benefits, moving to SOA can be an expensive and complex transition. Open Source solutions like those from Red Hat remove that complexity and expense with an integrated, modular, open source SOA platform at a significantly lower total cost of acquisition and ownership than commercial alternatives. Coupled with rich Web 2.0 interfaces and personalisation technology, it can improve productivity for users of SOA based, automated business processes. Those businesses that provide the best user experience will after all have a competitive advantage.