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| Home > SOA and Web Services > SOA Overview |
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| Adopting an SOA approach can lead to greater IT efficiency, better resource utilization and lower maintenance costs |
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| SOA Overview |
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IT departments are being challenged to deliver new applications that will improve population services and while further integrating and extending the life of existing applications.
Developing application software and building business processes based on a Service-Oriented Architecture is fast becoming the de facto way to achieve this agility, while still allowing healthcare organizations to control costs and maximize existing IT infrastructure utilization.
What is SOA?
In the SOA model, business functionality is decomposed into discrete chunks called “services”, which can be distributed over a network and can be combined and reused to create complete business applications. The most common type of services is called “Web services” because the communications protocol used for exchanging information with these services is based on the standard Internet Protocol (IP/HTTP).
These services are self-contained and fully autonomous units that ‘abstract’ or hide the complexities of the underlying business logic from the business process or application (called the “service consumer”) that uses the service. Once services are published (by “service providers”), they are easily included in an organization’s business processes, and easily decoupled when processes need to be changed.
Most Web services follow a ‘request-response’ model – the service consumer passes a request and supporting data to the service provider, which in turn performs the requested function using the data provided, and then passes the result back to the requestor.
Why Bother with SOA?
With SOA’s building block approach, you can use Web services to compose applications, orchestrate business processes, manage enterprise information and deliver applications and content to users more quickly and cost-effectively than through traditional application development approaches. And because services are only ‘loosely coupled’ to the consuming application or process, changes can be made to services without impacting those consumers, thus making it easier for organizations to change or add business processes quickly in response to changing needs.
The SOA approach also leads to greater IT efficiency, better resource utilization and lower maintenance costs, all through the use of shared services in multiple processes and systems; and by wrapping existing applications with Web services functionality, making them SOA-compliant, you can continue to leverage your investments in legacy software – no need to rewrite or get rid of all your old applications.
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