Relationship between SOA and EA

Recently, SOA has become a hot topic. As a service-oriented architecture, SOA is highly praised by various vendors. After more than 20 years of development in the EA field, people are paying attention to IT systems that are increasingly complex and have lower ROI. What are the similarities and differences between SOA and EA as architectures?

A brief summary of the previous article "Service-Oriented Architecture and enterprise architecture" on the IBM website. the similarities and differences between SOA and EA are as follows:

1. Architecture

SOA ing between SOA and EA Architecture

Architecture field	SOA solution Stack	EA framework
Business	Business Process	Business Architecture
Applications	Services and components	Application Architecture
Integration and Middleware	Integrated architecture/ESB	Technical Architecture
Data	Data Architecture	Information Architecture
Operation	QoS, security, monitoring, and infrastructure	Technical Architecture

However, it is clear that the SOA field is a subset of the EA field. For example, SOA not only considers business architecture development. The output of business processes and other business architecture components (such as Component Business Modeling (CBM) are used as inputs to identify business services. On the contrary, EA considers the development of business architecture, including business processes and CBM. Similarly, from the perspective of application architecture, SOA considers modeling and development of services and components that implement services. The EA architecture not only processes SOA-specific components, it also processes other components, packages, and systems of the entire enterprise.

When analyzing the technical architecture, soa esb is only one of the many integration mechanisms that EA may need to deal. Note that SOA does not handle the content management architecture, and EA will handle this issue.

Another overlapping area is security and service management. In fact, SOA security is a special case that must be specified for overall security. SOA service management and monitoring are a subset of system management that EA must handle.

EA architecture focuses on the macro level, while SOA architecture focuses on the micro level.

2. Governance

Possible ing between SOA and EA governance organization:

• SOA executive strategy committee ing to architecture Steering Committee
• The SOA Review Board maps to the architecture Review Board
• Soa coe can be mapped to design authority (a concept that is very popular in the UK, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, but is not commonly used in the United States). However, even with design authority, enterprises may still choose to establish soa coe to ensure the benefits of implementing SOA.
• There is usually no SoA Business Committee in the EA environment.

In general, there are many similarities and differences between SOA and EA governance:

Similarity:

• All of them must be monitored by the Executive Committee.
• The Review Board is required.
• All handle enterprise-level issues.
• Efforts are made to ensure that business and IT stakeholders are fully considered.

Different points:

• SOA needs to learn more about the business strategy information in the form of an SOA Business Committee that closely interacts with the business unit.
• SOA may require specific methods to ensure the investment in implementation, but the traditional EA governance model will not consider this.
• SOA Coe is an independent entity, and there is no direct peer item in the EA organization.
• Although EA governance looks at governance from the perspective of overall leadership and funding (Strategy), SOA governance treats it as something in the policy field and uses tools for governance (which is actually more about management, instead of governance ).

 

In addition, the author of the article 《Welcome to the convergence of SOA and EAThe article talks about collaboration and convergence between SOA and EA. SOA brings new value to ea. Mr. Wang's SOA and enterprise IT architecture planning also talked about the relationship between SOA and Architecture Planning.

In general, as described in the title of the article by Lao Hu consultant, convergence is an inevitable trend.