The diversity of the staffing and recruiting industry calls for a software solution that can address a firm's dynamic needs with flexible agility. At the same time, the solution needs to be extensible for your firm's future growth. It should also have the ability to integrate with other enterprise applications and Web services, resulting in streamlined processes that make your business successful. In short, the foundational architecture of today's successful solutions must support rapid, dynamic, market-driven changes more easily and cost-effectively than solutions developed in the past.

The answer to these diverse needs is service oriented architecture (SOA), an approach to building software applications that enables you to make the inevitable changes required to support and extend your business into other markets or services. With SOA, you reduce the expensive, custom development of other architecture methods by enabling the reuse of core components and the easy extensibility of others. It is based on the concept of designing an application with a set of 'building blocks' referred to as business services.

The reuse of these business services makes it easier to build new applications and make changes in existing applications. Using industry standard interfaces and creating business services without dependencies enables a company to flexibly change its business model, re-organize itself and partner dynamically.

Integration to other business applications is easier due to the technology independent nature of the software. As mentioned before, SOA software can easily 'talk' to other applications, thus obviating the need for high levels of customization to be done by a developer, thereby reducing your cost.

For example, your staffing firm currently uses a front office module for your recruiting activities. You have started working with a large client that will not accept candidates unless your firm uses the client's drug testing and background checking vendors.You are now faced with the challenge of integrating your front office module with your client's third party vendors to win their business. With an SOA-based application, you can seamlessly integrate both your client's drug testing and background checking vendor with your front office module.

SOA reduces total cost of system ownership (TCO) for you as well. As mentioned previously, SOA utilizes reusable components called business services. You can use these services to accelerate the development and deployment of new applications and functionality without having to completely rewrite software code.

So what's the ROI of SOA?

Here are some benefits of SOA solutions to consider:

• Reduce integration expense
• Increase asset reuse
• Increase business agility and adaptability
• Reduce business risk

SOA software also increases your end users' productivity giving them more efficient access to the information they need through integrated business processes. Increased user productivity means cost-savings for you by reducing the cost of service delivery while increasing the quality of service. Extensible software developed with SOA increases the lifespan of your solution and technology investments.

So when you are evaluating new staffing and recruiting software, how can you ensure that you have this extensibility, flexibility and ability to customize in your solution? One of the main considerations you should look at is whether that provider is using the 'building block' type of architecture that is unique to SOA, which defines a growing business-driven technology trend. In fact, a Gartner paper states that "by 2008, SOA will provide the basis of 80 percent of development projects."

For more information on service oriented architecture, click on the following white paper or article:

Adobe Systems - Service Oriented Architecture White Paper: This pdf paper examines SOA, its history, business drivers and the standards that may be used to implement it. It attempts to define SOA and reviews basic and extended models of SOA in use today.

Microsoft Corp. - Learn about Service Oriented Architecture: This Web white paper explores SOA in the context of how IT departments are managing increasingly complex IT portfolios. Yet as business needs change, these departments must still ensure that their technologies remain aligned with business goals. Failure to do so compromises organizational agility.

For more about SOA-based recruiting software click: www.pointwing.com.