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Agility and technology reuse are the major benefits associated to SOA. The reality is that SOA, frequently approached outside an Enterprise Architecture context, is developed incrementally, without the benefit of the big picture the Enterprise Architecture delivers. As a consequence, the promised agility is achieved late, towards the end of the SOAisation of your Enterprise when technology reuse may require costly redesign.
It is worth mentioning though that Business process reuse rather than IT is the advantage since SOA identifies similar business activities and groups them in a service. SOA reduces process replication and then the application de-duplication. Nonetheless, there are a few other major SOA benefits which should be more easily achieved, understood and accepted. Invoking these advantages would make SOA a joyous sell rather than the reported stressing experience.
1. Business service accountability, improving business and IT governance.
Applications and suites, usually a bundle of many functions, provide many services; in practice, a large group of business and IT people will share the responsibilities for the data and behavior of applications. But who can hold accountable such a group of individuals with many other responsibilities? Neither the stick nor the carrot would work in such an environment where neither accountability or authority can be assumed. On the other hand, for a SOA business service, there is a specific function or group assigned responsibility: it does not matter it is an IT or business issue, there is one single point of contact which will assume blame or praise.
2. IT technology virtualisation behind SOA business services, reducing the Business and IT divide and enabling audit for a regulatory compliant architecture.
This a major achievement since your applications and technology are hidden behind IT services with contract interfaces supplied to the business. From a business perspective this is what really counts. IT becomes a service provider offering business services at a QoS secured by an SLA, well comprehended, quantified and eventually paid for by the business. No more blame culture. The separation of concerns pacifies the parties with no more business and IT divide as an additional advantage. The access is logged as well for various reasons such as regulatory.
3. Untangling the applications providing a clean architecture, reducing the side effects of change.
There is no more random access to parts of applications or databases which makes any change a burden and any modification of an application a major risk because of unforseeable effects.
4. Extended lifetime for your legacy applications, reducing the immediate pressure to replace them.
Although there are other increasing costs related to legacy technology, there is no more pressure to replace it; you can do it at your own convenience when a viable alternative exists. This is an extension of the technology virtualisation.
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