Executive's Guide to IT Governance: Improving Systems Processes with Service Management, COBIT, and ITIL

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Importance of IT Service-Oriented Architecture for IT Governance Systems

PROFESSIONALS WHO HAVE BEEN WORKING with IT systems and applications over the years know that IT technologies and techniques are always changing and evolving. What was a hot new concept just a few years ago often soon goes away and is replaced by something else new and completely different. In other cases, concepts that once seemed too advanced or even strange soon evolved into normal accepted practices. Client–server computer system configurations are an example of the latter. They were a new and different concept in perhaps the mid-1990s but are now the standard language of IT. Managing IT applications through service-oriented architectures (SOA) is another relatively new concept that will soon become part of the standard language of IT. We are using the abbreviation SOA although others sometimes use the name software as a service (SaaS) as well. They both mean about the same thing, and we will use SOA throughout these chapters as we explain the concept.

SOA is an IT systems approach where an application’s business logic or individual functions are modularized and presented as services for consumer/client applications. A key concept is that the actual IT services provided are loosely coupled and independent of an actual application implementation. As a result, IT developers can build applications by selecting and grouping various IT components to form new applications, analogous to the ...