Business: Key Concepts

Business stakeholders should be interested in SOA and care about its adoption for many reasons. Flexibility is important to all organizations, and IT is a tool that can help organizations attain flexibility. Organizations that recognize a need to be more responsive to their markets, want to leverage that responsiveness to be more profitable, increase market share, and improve customer loyalty (all scenarios that represent improvements in business outcomes) and that are prepared to leverage their IT capabilities to achieve these advantages should care about SOA. SOA is the architecture choice for agility.

Organizations pursuing business or IT transformation, seeking faster time to value from IT, trying to modernizing strategic applications, attempting to lower the lifetime cost of applications or infrastructure, trying to do more for less, pursuing reuse as a goal to bring products or capabilities to the market faster, and looking to make flexibility a strategic capability should understand and pursue SOA adoption.