Hundreds of new industry-specific mandates, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and privacy requirements based on the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, are either in place now or scheduled to take effect in the near future. While complying with these mandates may seem daunting, businesses actually now have an opportunity to make improvements that go beyond mere compliance to increase the efficiency and predictability of their operations.

Unfortunately, many organizations don't view compliance with optimism, and it's easy to see why. Compliance means managing and interpreting large amounts of information from disparate sources. It may require significant changes in technology infrastructures, financial reporting, records management and retention, and risk management practices. AMR Research estimates that spending on Sarbanes-Oxley compliance in 2005 could reach almost $6 billion.

But consider the upside. Accurate, real-time records and content management systems do more than help companies address the requirements of complex regulation. They can spur productivity, enhance customer service, and boost return on technology investments.

Compliance Help from SOA
New regulations mean that businesses may have to invest in improving their data management. They can take an ad hoc tactical approach and deal with individual regulations as they come along or seize the opportunity to improve overall business operations in the process. The tactical approach is tedious, expensive, and time-consuming. Ad hoc techniques don't fully utilize - or gain insight from - company information on-demand.

Web Services, which is software that connects application and data regardless of underlying technologies, consist of a set of industry-standard technologies that can ease the burden of regulatory compliance. An IT infrastructure composed of collections of reusable Web Services to connect data from various sources - both inside the enterprise and outside at customer, partner, and supplier locations - to solve specific business problems is often referred to as a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

So what is an SOA and why is it invaluable?
At its simplest, an SOA involves having common business processes available in a central repository for use and reuse, all in a secure well-managed environment. An SOA provides an enterprise with the flexibility to take elements of business processes in the underlying IT infrastructure and reuse them to address changing business priorities. Previously, when a company needed to change a business process, like complying with a new regulatory directive, the IT department would need months to adapt silo'd manually coded connections to move the data in a way that would assure compliance. The loosely coupled connections common to an SOA create a flexible IT infrastructure that can cut the time to implement those same new business process to days.

Gartner predicts that by 2008 more than 60% of enterprises will use SOA as the "guiding principle" for IT infrastructures that support critical applications and processes. Another study found that 75% of companies plan to start investing in SOAs in the next year.

An SOA relies on industry standards, which provide a layer of instant integration capability that lets all types of software and hardware work together and share data. The SOA approach itself is a significant change from the traditional IT model. Instead of structuring applications based on functions, components, and objects, the SOA approach comes down to how a company can actually structure applications around services. How each SOA works depends on the requirements of the business deploying it, since it's the business functions in the applications that are being integrated. For example, if your company's IT infrastructure follows an SOA approach, it will include software applications that are exposed through the Internet that can be made available to all the customers, partners, and others you do business with. Adopting an SOA can remedy compliance issues as well as evolving IT infrastructure to embrace technology advances as they happen. To do this, you'll need the right technology in place.

SOA isn't a product, and it isn't a platform; it's an architectural approach. There's no one set of SOA blueprints to follow or SOA product suites required for a company to build an SOA. If your company wants to build an SOA, you first need to assess the technology products you're using and determine if they are based on industry standards that support Web Services. It's essential to have productivity tools that support Web Services and SOA as well as to support the compliance initiatives that your organization may be dealing with. While some standards are open source, it's wise to lean toward the vendors that contribute to standards bodies and work on developing Web Services specifications.

Every organization should have a server foundation that's scalable, secure, and adaptable to changes in business and technology. While most organizations have already selected a J2EE foundation layer, those that haven't must think about what will be the foundation of their business needs today and business growth tomorrow. Some of the largest and most trusted vendors are IBM, BEA Systems, and Oracle. According to both Gartner and IDC, IBM is the most popular choice for application servers, integration servers, and portal servers. BEA typically does well in the application server market, but lately there's been uncertainty about its long-term viability given the drop in its market share, a steady stream of executive departures, and continued speculation that it's an acquisition target. Oracle is a solid database vendor, but it isn't best of breed for application/IT infrastructure, and the company will need to deploy many resources this year integrating the recently acquired PeopleSoft.

The next step your company should take toward establishing an SOA is to map out a blueprint for a customized architecture, one that's going to best serve not only your business needs but also the needs of the parties you conduct business with. Knowing and understanding business processes is just as important as pure technology in successfully deploying an SOA, so it's essential to your SOA investment to select systems integrators that you trust and that know your businesses. Industry standards that support Web Services must be integrated with industry semantics, which vary by vertical industry. Systems integrators teaming with partners with vast vertical industry expertise, like IBM's vertical market strategy for products, could add greater value for customers deploying an SOA.

With an SOA, IT will be tightly integrated with both business objectives and compliance regulations, the government can be assured that mandates are being adhered to, customers will be more satisfied, projects can be delivered faster and cheaper, costs can be reduced, and applications can be extended out to partners and customers.