DIGITAL BUSINESS The IT department is a conundrum to most business leaders in financial services organisations. Without it, they realise that they could not operate effectively in a world of ever-increasing transaction volumes and analytic-driven product development. Yet the need for greater agility on the business side has chafed under the restrictive models imposed by legacy systems and monolithic applications, while remaining resistant to the “next” big rip-and-replace technology strategy.
I believe that service oriented architecture (SOA) can offer an evolutionary approach to creating a partnership between business and IT. The promise of SOA has been discussed for a number of years. Some industry spokespeople attempt to convince us that we need to rewrite our complete application portfolios in order to realise the benefits of SOA: in a recent magazine article, Larry Ellison claims the benefits of SOA will be realised in 10 to 20 years.
