Service Oriented Architecture (SOA):

SOA is a business-centric IT architectural approach that supports integrating the business as linked, repeatable business tasks, or services. SOA helps users build composite applications, which are applications that draw upon functionality from multiple sources within and beyond the enterprise to support horizontal business processes.

In many organizations, the people who are delivering services are in different buildings, countries and time zones. They can even be in different companies when work is outsourced or performed by business partners. In such distributed development environments, it’s vital that the established SOA governance policies guide management of activities throughout the service lifecycle.

The IBM Rational® service-oriented architecture (SOA) solution provides consulting services, an SOA governance model, and service lifecycle management infrastructure and tools that, together, can help to realize the full potential of the SOA investments.



A major challenge in adopting an SOA is that many groups, both internal and external to the organization, contribute to the execution of strategic business processes. With an SOA, once-siloed data is now exposed as services and shared across departments, lines of business and even companies—raising concerns about decision rights and process measurement and control. Who makes a decision on whether a service can be accessible to other applications? Who should fund the shared service? Who owns it? How is it implemented? How do you determine whether it achieves expected results? Who’s responsible for fixing it if it breaks?

The Rational SOA solution enables to answer these questions with a holistic approach to SOA adoption that addresses both governance and management issues. A proven SOA governance model guides through the process of setting up the policies, procedures and processes required for efficient and effective decision making throughout the business and IT organization. Once established, the execution of the governance process is realized through a service lifecycle management infrastructure, which defines the end-to-end process of how services will be developed and managed throughout the enterprise.