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Service Oriented Business Architecture (SOBA) Defined

SOBA aligns information regarding the functional design of the business to audiences based on the organizational hierarchy. Executives are the audience for the SOBA Business Architecture Layer (BAL) information. Business managers and workers are the audience for the SOBA Business Logic Layer (BLL) information. Systems analysts and technology architects are the audience for the SOBA Service Definitions.

A Service Oriented Business Architecture (SOBA) represents the functional design of a business entity. A SOBA identifies and defines functional components, their relationships with each other and with external entities. A SOBA defines the horizontal and vertical aspects of business functionality. The horizontal aspect is the workflow. The vertical aspect is the decomposition of the workflow to the services level.

SOBA Benefits

SOBA Service Definitions are the fundamental requirements for an IT system. Systems designed and developed from SOBA Service Definitions are in automatic alignment with business operations.

Businesses can utilize the SOBA to facilitate the execution of business process reengineering activities. Revisions to the business workflow are expressed as changes to the horizontal aspect of the SOA. The vertical aspect of SOA maps the workflow changes to the underlying systems. This mapping represents the future state of the system. IT uses an analysis of the difference between the current state and future state to derive transition requirements.

Learn How KT1 Design Helps Overcome SOA Challenges

SOBA Challenges

Most companies fail to realize the benefits of a SOBA because the functional design of their business is an informal collection of incoherent horizontal and vertical information.