Currently, because of technological advancement, the world of business has experienced rapid growth of applications and their integration in companies leading to a spike in the alignment of business processes with Information technology. Most companies are being encouraged to adopt enterprise architecture to bridge the gap between business processes and information technology advancements. However, the adoption of technology by businesses not only comes along with benefits but also challenges. Building Block is a package of business functionality that is used to meet business requirements in a company.
During software development, the building blocks provide the project team with the business processes and services. The building block can be referred to as a (Mcleod, 2016.). The difference between an object and a service as a building block is that objects are specified tasks performed by software while the distributed object performs service. The business issues that are solved by the assistance of classes include object identity and transparent communication. Transparent communication is the condition that businesses should have to help achieve authenticity, honesty, and clarity. This solve the issues pertaining to giving feedback to every department of the company. Each company has its goals, and for its smooth running, the identification of the business goals is vital to all the employees (Ibarra-Esquer et al., 2017). The business issues that are solved using services include the application of explicit communication and heterogeneous platforms.
SOA involves the designing of a service. The services are used in the architecture of a company to deliver distinguished requirements in the business infrastructure. On the other hand, Web services are a second, advanced generation among the advanced technology. The web services are described as a transition from static web pages to dynamic web pages. Web services and SOA share a couple of characteristics. First, a service is a key concept of SOA (Niknejad et al., 2020). It was first adopted in business, and then later it becomes useful in information technology. In information technology, the concept of software service was adopted, and software programs perform the service. The software services provide an impact that matters to businesses and people. The next shared characteristic is messaging. SOA has software services that invoke each other directly.
The software services include things such as programming-language function calls. They trigger each other by sending messages through a feature called Web 2.0. Current generations are exposed to various blogs such as YouTube, microblogging, and social networking, where they message each other directly. The last characteristic is message security. SOA offers message security through information integrity and data security. Data security is performed through message encryption, while information integrity is performed through a cryptographic integrity check. Many software services have focused on providing message security because fundamental information security is critical to a company (Niknejad et al., 2020).
In a growing business, the processes are critical because they help improve the business to obtain a competitive advantage. The business processes can either be formal or informal and can affect a variety of business functions. An example of such a business process in auditing to identify the issues that should be addressed. The three main steps in business processes are identifying the need for change, analyzing the current operations, and creating an improvement plan. The first step involves the identification of a company’s need for change. The identification of the need for change helps a business to spot improvement opportunities. Therefore in this step, a business is required to conduct a process audit. The audit helps identify the current issues and potential risks that can affect the business’s performance (Syed Ibrahim et al., 2019). The audit report developed by the auditors helps outline the areas of priority while addressing the improvement opportunities. Taking action on the improvement opportunities helps the business achieve its goals.
The next step is analyzing the current processes, which is critical in developing a procedure. In this step, the business can understand its action and set realistic goals to address the identified issues. During this step, tools such as effect analysis, operational surveys, and process mapping are important. The final step is creating an improvement plan that acts as the strategy for effecting the required change (Syed Ibrahim et al., 2019). In this step, the broken actions are identified and improved to help the business achieve its objectives. The business must have a solution for the improvement of the business included in the improvement plan. The process must include all the stakeholders in the business to ensure that all issues are addressed. The process can be analyzed in the diagram below. The services affect each other directly because the result of each one becomes the input of the other.
The service registry, also known as a database, contains the list of all the services. All the services that clients could use are mentioned and made to be accessible directly to the clients including those from remote places. On report of a service look up request from a client, the request comes into the service database straightly and a request for the service location is sent to the client after the database search. The service provider is responsible for the provision of the services that are mentioned in the registry. These services are registered in the database with their names in such a way that when a client sends a service request, the client receives the names of the services providers who are responsible for the handling of the client service request from the beginning to the end, providing all the client’s requirements.
The most important thing about SOA to a business
Being the first step, client request is the most significant for a business since it is where the client requests for the service of choice. If there was absence of service request, there would be nullification of the role provided by service providers as it is vital for the client requests to be catered for by the service providers. There would also be no need of going through the list of services in the database if there were no client requests. Therefore it is critical to identify the relationships between them for the business process to be a success. In auditing business processes, the analysis of the issues cannot happen before the issues are identified, and the creation of an improvement plan cannot take place before the issues are properly analyzed (Sweeny, 2010). The chronological relationship between the steps in evaluating business processes is essential.
References
Mcleod, G. M. (2016.). A Business and Solution Building Block Approach to EA … Retrieved November 8, 2020, from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/300445882_A_Business_and_Solution_Building_Block_Approach_to_EA_Project_Planning
Sweeny, R. (2010). Achieving Service-Oriented Architecture. Applying an Enterprise Archecture Approach. John Willey & sons, Inc.
Syed Ibrahim, M., Hanif, A., Jamal, F. Q., & Ahsan, A. (2019). Towards successful business process improvement–An extension of change acceleration process model. PloS one, 14(11), e0225669.
Ibarra-Esquer, J. E., González-Navarro, F. F., Flores-Rios, B. L., Burtseva, L., & Astorga-Vargas, M. A. (2017). Tracking the evolution of the internet of things concept across different application domains. Sensors, 17(6), 1379.
Niknejad, N., Ismail, W., Ghani, I., Nazari, B., & Bahari, M. (2020). Understanding Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA): A systematic literature review and directions for further investigation. Information Systems, 91, 101491.
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