Enterprise SOA

How does ESA improve the relationship between business and IT?

In the past, the relationship between business and IT has at times been tense. Business wants agility to implement new strategies quickly. Requirements are handed off to IT and not only does it seem to take a long time to implement the required functionality, but often much is lost in the translation from requirements document to executable system. ESA promises to repaint this picture by, in a way, decoupling the IT side from the business side and giving each what it has always sought. For the first time, enterprises can reap the benefits of a uniform IT architecture while also enjoying a new level of flexibility in IT that's sufficient to truly meet business needs.

A fundamental principle of ESA is the separation of business logic from application logic. Business analysts gain the ability to define, change, and adapt business processes, supported by enterprise services. IT's responsibility is equally clear: it must manage the stack from the application logic down to the physical infrastructure. IT is in charge of the underlying platform for ESA: the Enterprise Services Repository. IT must also deal with operational issues, run server farms, secure the infrastructure, ensure that the network is running properly, and much more. ESA in essence improves the relationship between business and IT by making it clear who owns what and giving business a degree of independence to do what it needs to do without having an impact ...