Sharpen the SOA: How Campaign Management Can Benefit from a Service-Oriented Architecture

摘要

The current holy grail of IT is a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that allows simple, quick and low-cost composition of complex business processes from functionally, organizationally or geographically disparate systems and compo-nents. Much has been written about SOA and Web services, but mostly from a technical, academic background, focusing on special applications or features. The full benefit from SOA for today's corporations, however, comes from being able to adapt whole business processes and not just individual applications to ever-changing needs. The more flexible a business process is, the more it will benefit from a good SOA that covers a large number of process variants and supports the easy plug-in of many diverse components. Campaign management can be considered a great benchmark for SOA because of its complexity and flexibility and because it involves transactional, planning and analytical components, thereby making use of the whole spectrum of enterprise software.