One of my favorite quotes about SOA came from Susan Certoma, CIO of Wachovia Bank, who oversaw the deployment of a huge SOA project across the bank's Corporate and Investment Banking division.
“It’s like a roller coaster. You go up and down, throw up a couple times, and at the end of the ride, everything’s great.�
How many times have you thrown up so far?
A new comprehensive account of Wachovoia's SOA has emerged. Financial Technology reports that Wachovia set out to transform its entire Corporate and Investment Banking division through SOA.
This suggests the effort had a lot of top-down support from the executive suite, versus the most oft-taken route to SOA -- building up gradually and incrementally from smaller quick-ROI projects.
Still, the project was not imposed on the organization as a massive, turn-the-organization-upside-down project. Rather, the effort was delivered in bite-size pieces. "Funding and support was built on trust and incremental deliverables," said Tony Bishop, SVP for the CIB technology group. "It was, 'Here is the plan -- each year we are going to deliver increments. If we do, then you will fund the next piece.'"
First, Wachovia integrated its front-end services to create a common interface for sales, trading and banking, followed by services for trade execution, positions, offerings and connectivity to markets.
Wachovia's CIB unit measures its SOA results with two indicators: time to market and the number of reusable parts. So far, he says, it has experienced about a 40 percent cost avoidance over three years using SOA rather than a traditional technology architecture, said Bishop.
Bishop's advice: "You've got to focus. You've got to be committed. You need to do it in incremental building blocks. SOA needs to be business-aligned and needs to have a top-down map and a bottom-up approach."
I imagine this helps ease the ups and downs of the roller coaster ride as well.
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