What's The Business Value Of Soa? Show It With Kpis

By Author: Mike Smith
Total Articles: 103
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If you're in IT, you're being asked to add more business value than ever. In fact, today's CIOs are being asked to become drivers of the business while at the same time many are trying to replace old and inflexible infrastructures with modern and flexible ones, according to InformationWeek's Analytics 2009 Global CIO Survey. This report adds that across the globe CIOs are fighting the stubborn perception that IT in general—and CIOs and their teams in particular—are cost centers rather than creators of value and accelerators of innovation. Does this sound familiar? Whether you already have an SOA in place—or you're just getting started with SOA—it is essential to prove business benefits.

Today, measuring cost and revenue impact as well as other SOA metrics is vital to any leading organization. Measuring the value and tracking changes to these metrics are critical as your SOA grows and its portfolio expands. Recent surveys from Forrester Research show organizations are increasingly implementing SOA as a business enabler. Furthermore, recent Gartner research concluded that:

- More than ...
... 60% of organizations said their SOA projects had a positive impact on their organization's ability to grow revenue; and

- SOA projects generated positive returnstypically within 10 months

A proven way to demonstrate an SOA's business value is through Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). KPIs use a language your business colleagues understand: metrics. They give you the means to measure a return on your SOA investment and directly link SOA projects to real business improvements:

- What KPIs you can use to start measuring SOA results

- How leading organizations—Avnet, Coca-Cola Enterprises and France Telecom—measure how SOA contributes to business success

- How Software AG can help you analyze and deliver on your SOA-based KPIs

Software AG, provides a complete solution for SOA Governance, CentraSite, that enables customers to manage their IT assets and measure their business value.

If you're looking for an introduction to SOA, please read our book, SOA Adoption for Dummies.

Software AG's 4,000 global customers provide testimony to its ability to deliver software for improving business processes and drive an agile IT infrastructure. Software AG's leading software portfolio helps foster new levels of IT agility through SOA and allows the rapid creation of new business processes with BPM.