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One of the biggest potential benefits of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is that it can enable organizations to more quickly and cost-effectively develop new applications and revise existing ones. That allows them to be more agile, to respond more rapidly to changing market conditions—not a bad attribute to have in a competitive environment.

SOA can help speed development processes in several ways. For one thing, it can enable easier integration; organizations can quickly connect disparate applications by developing standardized services. For another, SOA promotes increased reuse. Application components exposed as SOA services can be easily reused, slashing development time. And organizations can quickly deploy new business processes or modify existing ones in response to changing needs by using services as process building blocks.

"We know of a number of companies that have seen the first services they built significantly lower the time and cost required for delivering new applications and reconfiguring existing applications to support changes in business processes," says Ian Finley, research director at AMR Research.

"Ultimately, a fully service-oriented architecture enables companies to move much of the control of the business process to business managers [through business process management] and individual work practices to users [via Web 2.0]," Finley says. "This eliminates the 'IT middleman' in most system changes required to support business processes and individual work practices, radically reducing the time and effort required and eliminating much of the IT bottleneck companies face today."

Judith Hurwitz, president of consulting and research firm Hurwitz & Associates, cites several examples of companies that have been able to speed business processes by creating reusable services. One retailer developed a business service for adding a new partner into its network. The service shortened the time required to add a new partner by as much as a year, Hurwitz says.

"Before the SOA approach, the company created a new program for each new partner based on its specific requirements," Hurwitz says. "This often required several months of applications development and then even more months of testing. With the business service, the service could be configured with the differences of a particular partner."

Another company, an insurance provider, decided to create a set of services that were common across 10 different departments, Hurwitz says. Each of the departments had its own code base for processing a payment, processing claim service and checking credit, she says. "The company decided to create a series of consistent services that could be used in every department," she says.

By doing this, it was easier for users at the insurance company to ensure compliance with corporate rules and best practices when new applications were added, Hurwitz says. "It was also faster to build new 'composite applications' based on these services," she says. "In addition, in many cases these services could be used to more quickly and safely work with partners."

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