Service-Oriented Architecture - Ironworks Consulting

"We need it yesterday."

Organizations are under increased pressure to achieve and maintain high standards of performance and service in today's global 7 x 24 economy. Resources are often overwhelmed as they work diligently to do more with less, and do it faster, more efficiently, and better than ever before. They need to apply business practices and technology effectively in all aspects of their operations in order to compete under these demanding circumstances.

Many companies utilize a variety of technologies and products that run on multiple platforms. The pace of business innovation and change in these heterogeneous environments is often more time, resource and cost consuming than the organization can afford. Organizations are constantly searching for increased business agility - the ability to move quickly and easily with all internal and external touch points. They are also always looking for viable ways to extend the value of existing IT investments.

A flexible architecture is an essential building block to enable business agility. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) can be defined as the underlying structure supporting communication between business functions performed by one entity on behalf of another entity. SOA fosters business agility through several defining characteristics, including: loose coupling (changes to one service do not affect another service), reusability of services, and lower cost of development and assembly of services. The ultimate objective is to assemble and deploy these functions more quickly and reliably than in previous technologies in order to achieve competitive business advantage. An SOA also helps to better align IT to the business as well as it enables IT to focus more on the business processes and less on the underlying IT infrastructure.

At Ironworks, we bring a business focus and business process-centered mindset to our SOA engagements. Our goal is to help our clients increase revenues; increase customer satisfaction and retention; and increase efficiencies in order to achieve a higher return on their business technology investments.

Common Questions

Why adopt SOA?

A well thought out and executed SOA vision will enable an organization to be more rapidly develop and deploy business technology solutions. It will provide increased capabilities and quality while resulting in less overall complexity, cost, time to market, and risk.

Benefits from a well thought out and executed SOA include the ability to:

Adapt and implement changes quickly in response to business conditions. E.g.,:
- Post merger organization consolidations
- Process and systems realignments as part of business initiatives such as outsourcing, partner alliances
- Regulatory changes
- New product or service development and rollout.
- Increased and changing customer and business partner needs.
Migrate business functions and technologies from silo oriented structures to efficient business process aligned, shared services.
Reuse services that have been previously defined, developed, tested, and deployed.
Extend the life of legacy applications by exposing key legacy functions as services.
Minimize redundant infrastructure.
Implement an open, standards based platform; this in turn will drive compatibility and provide the foundation for business and technology innovations moving forward.
More easily support ongoing changes.

Organizations have found that by leveraging the benefits of SOA, they have been able to better align technology to the business and business processes. In turn, this will help the organization further achieve competitive advantage thru: increased revenues; increased customer satisfaction and retention; increased efficiencies; and higher returns on business and technology investments. In short, an SOA provides a platform for business transformation and optimization.

Common questions that clients face regarding SOA include:

What is our SOA Roadmap and how effective is it?
How should SOA fit within our architecture strategy?
To what extent are business processes and technology aligned within my organization? What role should SOA play?
To what extent are business rules separated and easily maintained vs. embedded within the applications?
How do we prepare and transform to SOA while continuing to deliver on our existing and planned commitments?
How should we govern SOA?
What are the costs, benefits, and risks of SOA for my organization?
How do we ensure that SOA actually does deliver business value, including improved time, cost, and quality to market?
How do we assess, re-tool, and transform our personnel for SOA?

Services

Our SOA offerings reflect our commitment to serve our clients in whatever manner is needed: from strategic to tactical, from planning to delivery to support, from advisory to hands on. We are available to help organizations establish, refine, and deliver their SOA vision and roadmap as well as augment and support organizations who have established their vision and our working on their solutions.

Following is an overview of our SOA services offerings:

SOA readiness assessments
Business process and SOA alignment
Architecture review, planning, and design
Technology evaluation, selection, and implementation
Standards & Methodologies evaluation, selection, and implementation
Solutions Development and Delivery
Personnel skills assessment, transformation planning, and mentoring
Program and Project Management
Governance

What makes us different?

We have a passion for working with clients to deliver timely, cost effective, mission critical business technology solutions.
We bring a business focus to managing and delivering business technology solutions.
We design and implement efficient “real world” solutions, not costly monolithic ones. Unlike many consulting firms, we implement the solutions we design for many of our clients.
We can help you “right size” the SOA vision for organization and lay out an understandable and achievable roadmap for realizing this vision. We leverage a proven, phased approach.
We work with many of the leading solutions and products, yet we’re not wedded to one tool or single solution. You will get an experienced, unbiased partner (not another salesman).
We are comfortable working in the strategic, mid-level, and tactical arenas. We are scalable and responsive from project level to enterprise level needs.
We are committed to leveraging and extending your legacy technology investments where appropriate.
We embed governance, compliance, security, controls, and other “right minded” considerations into how we conduct our work.
We have a proven service and customer satisfaction track record.

Ironworks delivers experience, creativity and know-how on each engagement. Our teams are staffed with highly qualified professionals who focus on what they know best. Because we don’t try to be everything to everyone, our experts stay experts and our new clients become lasting clients.