Service-Oriented Architecture Enables a Global

As IT organizations (ITOs) globally span their value chains across governments and cultures, service-oriented architecture (SOA) provides valuable technical and business principles for success. We define SOA as a dynamic, general-purpose, extensible, federated interoperability architecture. Although SOA is often thought of as synonymous with Web services architecture (WSA), WSA is just one example of an architecture embodying these principles. Containerization (a.k.a. intermodal shipping), the revolution in global shipping, exemplifies SOA principles as well. Architected around a standard shipping container that is extensible to new transports and new uses, containerization is an interoperability architecture that enables a dynamic, general-purpose, federated network of shipping networks. This “system of systems” approach is the essential principle of SOAs such as containerization, the Internet, the Web, and WSA.

Bottom Line: A global ITO must be structured as “an ITO of ITOs,” in which each regional ITO has a large degree of autonomy to adapt to local conditions, but is integrated with its peer regions via federated service-oriented business and IT architectures.

META Group originally published this article on 10 February 2004.