Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and "re-purposing" old legacy systems with SOA seem to be a bottom line necessity for doing any kind of Business Process Optimization or improvement!
No matter which vertical you choose, Banking, Finance. Insurance, Healthcare, Telecom, early adopters have the curse of the early adopter - Legacy systems into which they have sunk millions and millions of dollars.
Don't mistake me - I side with millions of satisfied employees in many a large company, where their Payroll checks are cut every week or every two weeks, with a good old, reliable mainframe system and a totally trustworthy Payroll program developed in Cobol, forty years ago!
Rumors are that even in the famous Software company that rhymes with picromoft, payroll is still handled by a mainframe system, although they may not want to talk about it too much!
A company, particularly one that has an online mode of operation like Amazon or E-Loan or Insurance companies like GEICO, that do a lot of their business online, many backend systems are all already hooked up together or developed from scratch to work together.
But go to any traditional mainline company like Procter and Gamble and try to get some idea of how an end to end process like an Order to Cash or shipping and warehousing process works and get some statistics on typical cycle time, you will be so out of luck!
They all operate on islands of automation with manual islands of work in between!
Retrofitting all these legacy systems with Service Oriented Architectures and having them talk to each other is a tall order, although it is beginning to take root in a number of companies!
Forget old mainframe based legacy systems! Even companies that use modern ERP and other packages from Oracle, Oracle/Peoplesoft, and SAP all have legacy decisions to buy different components from different software makers, and are all saddled with difficulties in getting information out of one and into another!
Try integrating data between an Oracle Financial Package with SAP Manufacturing, with Manugistics Warehousing application in a stupidly simplified Order to Cash process! Each of these have their own reporting packages and may not allow you to access data directly. You can take data out in the form of a report or a spreadsheet and feed it to the next system in the process.
Then it becomes glue and stick all across and very painful to integrate. If only all these packages also come with SOA interfaces!
Some of them do come with some form of SOA Interfaces but by no means they are all common and well defined!
There is so much of waste of human effort, time and money in many end to end business processes in companies! If only they can squeeze all these out! Prerequisite for all of this is the ability to integrate seamlessly with each other and see where the bottlenecks are. SOAs can go a long way to making this happen.
Management means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folklore and superstition, and of cooperation for force. . . Peter F. Drucker.
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