SOA – In Your Business, What’s Slowing You Down?
Research 
overwhelmingly has demonstrated that the fastest moving markets where a small edge can mean dramatic revenue gains include the finance, capital, distribution and insurance industries. What slows you down is processes that are not well understood can neither work nor change fast. Compounding this is expensive activities that are “baked in” with low value activities that impede the re-allocation to either lower cost IT, lower cost labor or both. Think outsourcing low value activity, but only if you can break the negative “baked in” approach. Currently, one of the best ways to “un-bake” your enterprise for high performance is through SOA. SOA process re-engineering success factors include tech savvy management, engineering versus just coding SOA, increased centralized SOA management and enterprise versus LOB based profitability incentives. The key question to ask is: Will LOB’s pay for the services or will access be free? Free access will likely result in over use of your services and associated resources. In addition, there is added cost for accounting related to charging for services. Bottom line is either you move faster or your customers will move to faster competitors.
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Destroying Applications Performance Bottlenecks
A bottleneck is a well-known term in operations management and is defined as a resource that cannot meet demand. In the case of applications, this is typically response time as seen by users. All kinds of systems experience bottlenecks including production of things such as clothes, creation of hamburgers off a McDonald’s assembly line or in the case at hand, IT systems. For IT systems, specifically, the key to destroying bottlenecks is to consider performance analysis throughout the development lifecycle and into production. First, understand the Theory of Constraints, which is relevant for all systems. Second, understand that you need to minimize bottlenecks to meet SLA requirements rather than in absolute terms.