SOA has been around for a number of years and has had success in a number of companies. It has helped business support a wide range of activities from helping them move from legacy systems to launching new and innovative business models. In parallel with the development of SOA the world of retail has also under gone a significant transformation with the rapid growth of online retailing and the Bricks and Mortar businesses embracing multi-channel retail and digital distribution. So what is the connection between SOA and Retail? SOA provides the potential for retail business to build a strong foundation for delivery / enhancement of their multichannel customer offers. Over the past 12 months a number of the retail and service provider clients have been bumping up against this problem as they push forward their multichannel strategy delivery. Some retailers are either struggling to deliver coherent multichannel offerings using a set of legacy systems that silo the customer and product information, or trying to develop new systems stacks to deliver new customer offerings. There are real benefits in the looking at building a more Services Orientated approach to delivering a multi-channel business, some of these include:

• Greater control of the customer experience and channel consistency
• Extending channel boundaries beyond the typical enterprise, e.g. exposing services that can easily be consume and reused Tescos API
• Improving speed to market

These benefits are being delivered by:

• Prevent business rules / logic from becoming embedded in the channel facing systems
• Lowering costs through reuse
• Decoupling systems to simplify regression and acceptance testing

How do you get started? At transform we have recently started using a capability-scoring model to assess the maturity of the services. This is a great way to understand the current maturity of SOA in your organisation and identify the key gaps to close to reach the desired end state. Getting a good view of integration and specifically the role of SOA in your multichannel journey can deliver real benefits both in the IT and business domains.