ebizQ's Business Agility Watch

At InfoWorld's SOA Executive Forum, Sandy Carter, VP for SOA and WebSphere Strategy, Marketing and Channel at IBM, gave a presentation called "SOA from a Business Centric Perspective -- Enabling Innovation that Matters."

Carter indicated that IBM's SOA approach is both business-centric and IT focused. She encourages a people-centric approach, to improve people productivity by aggregating views that deliver information and interaction in the context of a business process.

Carter reported that she's taking information from 1,800 customers on how people are starting their SOA journey. She described several of IBM's clients' entry points.

Her first example of an SOA entry point: Broward School District in Florida has 55 different languages spoken and it is the sixth largest school district in the country with a multi-billion dollar budget. Broward County serves 174,000 students. Their biggest issue at the beginning was compliance with the Federal No Child Left Behind Act.

What they were able to do with their SOA was to leverage a portal as a front-end, and take down the time of compliance processing. Then they were able to duplicate the portal for other purposes. They have since built role-based portals for parents, for the teacher's association, for students to do their homework and the portals now exist in eight different languages.

IBM's experience with Harley-Davidson Financial Services in their entry point to SOA: Harley-Davidson's problem was needing flexibility for when to run their financial promotions. They needed to quickly create financial incentive programs with the dealerships having control over when to run sales, because the best time to run financial promotions for buying motorcycles was when the weather was beautiful, and in places like Australia, the weather is totally different and the process could not be run centrally.

The CIO of Harley decided to de-couple processes to allow individual countries, cities or regions to run their marketing promotions whenever they want. They were able to then duplicate their processes from there.