Business Drivers for Enterprise SOA

Geniant’s white paper on Service Oriented Architecture started me thinking about the business drivers to E-SOA. They mention flexibility and efficiency, but I think there’s another “value add” happening, too.

Flexibility – by abstracting away from the implementation of business processes, the organization has more freedom to choose an implementation without impacting the client application.

Efficiency – by developing skills around standards and well-known techniques, the organization gets better reuse of knowledge at the application, application infrastructure, and technical infrastructure levels. Also, by using mechanisms supported by the IT industry at large, teams can incorporate work done by other organizations, resulting in more gain for less effort.

Other added value – the organization can introduce new capabilities into the SOA and reap the benefits everywhere. This is like efficiency, but it’s bigger. It means the ability to leverage new and existing assets enterprise wide. Of course, there’s significant effort to wrapping a capability in a generic service interface, but the possibilities of benefiting from it in more than one place can change the economics involved, and potentially make worthwhile a generalization effort that wasn’t previously.

Are there other facets of business value involved?