An interview with Shanghai Mobile’s CIO on implementing Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
MKQ – Creating competitive advantage with IT architecture – An interview with Shanghai Mobile’s CIO
Whoever is interested in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) might find this article interesting. Though it might be a little bit difficult for people with little technical background, it seems not that complicated to upgrade a system in big scale.
Managing Information for Innovation 
Right, SOA is kind of light-weight solution for upgrading a system in a large scale. I read a case study in Harvard Business Review,2007. That story generally describes a touch choice between deploying a traditional,costly solution and an innovative yet risky solution named SOA. In 2007, SOA is totally a new concept and not proved in any significant case. Now, it’s interesitng to see that SOA becomes a popular and reliable sulution in industry.
“If I can get a bit more technical, we essentially created a “base-class library” for our programming efforts, with builtin performance-monitoring functions. Now,
every new application we develop will automatically
inherit the ability to monitor and generate
a traceable log of the business transactions. That
allows us to track down the bottleneck in every
delayed business transaction and detect performance
issues as they arise.” I like this part in the article. This is the part that SOA enhances the business logic and business efficiency.
Theoretically, service-oriented architecture is a flexible mechanism to run business in changeable environment, but from my research when I took part in the IBM SOA competition regarding implanting SOA in real business, I found few companies would like to change their existing architecture in order to cater for an uncertain increase of business process efficiency. Just like what Xie Qin said, change to an organization is painful and with a high risk. In the business reengineering process, the upper managers need to pay special attention to preparing adequate risk mitigation measure and contingency plan to minimize the side-effect of the change.