In this chapter, we addressed the problem that a lot of companies face today, their organization and their IT are organized in silos. This leads to duplication of functionality and information and makes it hard and expensive to change and to adapt to changing markets, rules, and regulations. The IT department is not able to deliver solutions and changes fast enough and the business people are not able to communicate their needs well enough. This results in IT that is lagging behind and frustrated people in the organization on both sides.
To solve this problem, we need to design our organization in a way that fits the long-term business goals of an organization. The IT solutions need to be aligned with our organization and with these same goals. To make this possible, architecture should be applied whenever a change is implemented in the organization that involves information (systems). There are different types of architecture that can be applied such as enterprise architecture, solution architecture, and project architecture.
Service Oriented Architecture is a specific reference architecture that helps solve the data and functionality duplication, thus making the companies that apply this more flexible, and operate more efficiently.
In the next chapter, we explain in detail exactly what services and Service Oriented Architecture mean, and how this type of architecture is a solution to the misalignment of business and IT, and for functional and data duplications in the situations that we've mentioned in this chapter.