“SOA has been a movement for both the government as well as commercial industry for the past eight to nine years,” said Ronald Schmelzer, a managing partner at Zapthink, an IT advisory and analysis firm in Baltimore. “It’s a way to deal with the fact that IT systems are more and more complicated. The more technology there is, the harder it is to change. It’s like we’ve applied all this glue, and now making an upgrade or change can take years and costs millions or even billions because of all the components and interconnections.”

Schmelzer also referred to three benefits that SOA provides: loose coupling, the ability to make changes without breaking existing systems; composition, the ability to take existing systems and combine them for new tasks; and abstracting heterogeneity, the use of standards and service contracts so that customers looking for specific technological services already will be familiar with the interface being used.

Read more at: Government Executive