Sriram Anand

SOA initiatives have gathered momentum in the past year with more enterprises either implementing SOA or considering implementing in the near future. The implementations we studied reveal that one of the critical challenges in SOA is designing an effective governance mechanism. A good understanding of governance concepts is essential to implementing and operating a successful SOA. Reliable governance for SOA leads to a manifold increase in an enterprise's ability to achieve the goal of business agility through SOA. Defining IT Governance The IT Governance Institute defines IT governance as "a structure of relationships and processes to control the enterprise in order to achieve the enterprise's goals by adding value while balancing risk versus return over IT and its proc... (more)

SOA Goes Beyond Object-Oriented Programming

The concept of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) can be illustrated by leveraging commonly understood concepts of object-oriented programming. Services comply with many of the standard principles that form the bedrock of object-oriented programming. However, SOA provides benefits at a much higher level of the IT value chain as discussed below. In the object-oriented world, a class is th... (more)

Managing Enterprise Data Complexity Using Web Services: Part 2

Enterprises are increasingly feeling the need for shorter lead time for decision making, the need to extract and present KPI (Key Performance Indicators) to management, and the need for enhanced response capability. These business needs are not in sync with the technological challenges such as the presence of heterogeneous technologies and disparate enterprise systems (e.g., ERP, SCM, CR... (more)

Best Practices and Solutions for Managing Versioning of SOA Web Services

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web services are being critically considered by most organizations today in some form or another. The adoption of SOA and Web services has gained momentum after the standardization of various aspects such as security, business process coordination, transaction management, communication protocol, registration and discovery, etc. However, one notable... (more)

The Business Value of SOA-Based Agile IT Architectures

Agile IT systems are systems that are malleable enough to address business uncertainties. Such systems can effectively respond to internal and external stimuli in a very short period of time. Flexible IT systems imply that the IT architecture underlying them is itself flexible and lends itself to incorporating changes in a dynamic fashion. Architectural approaches such as Service Oriente... (more)