Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) – a highly evolved approach to integration that transforms IT service delivery – can significantly improve business agility and streamline business processes.

A good enterprise service bus (ESB) – a component of SOA used to develop services – can enhance SOA by enabling a loosely coupled relationship between service interfaces and applications, minimizing code-writing and facilitating service changes without requiring intimate knowledge of underlying enterprise systems.

This paper discusses the relationship between ESB, loose coupling, and the effort needed to align IT with business process owners in order to ensure a successful SOA implementation in any organization.