It’s as if someone in the legal department wrote that IT definition in language few others could understand. Another definition of SOA was: “SOA is essentially a collection of services.” Clearly that definition does not help either.
Services are like reusable software programs, or modules. You might even compare them to a macro in Excel. You can use and reuse them instead of writing code to perform common functions.
Oracle offers a technical explanation of SOA, which you find in Table 13.1. The
Public Sector Case at the end of this chapter shows the value of SOA