Having just spent time in Toronto, I was interested to see this new story on the Ontario provincial government's implementation of service-oriented architecture.
Interestingly still, Ontario has been at it for close to a decade, calling it their "common components" approach. "For us, SOA is more a re-branding of an approach we've had in play since about 1999," Ron Huxter, the province's chief technology officer, is quoted as saying.
Ontario's SOA didn't start out as a huge, concerted drive to service-orientation. Rather, there were many developments along the way involving different departments and applications. "It was more the realization of a thousand points of light than a single thunderbolt," Huxter said.
Things started in 1998,when the government consolidated 24 ministry IT departments, creating eight new IT organizations responsible for "clusters" of ministries with similar or related responsibilities and ways of doing business. According to the article, the new IT organizations were charged with "harvesting as much reuse as possible." In addition, 24 different HR and ERP systems were replaced by single enterprise-wide systems.
The province's SOA effort includes SOA centers of excellence that develop and implement shared tools and platforms based on .NET framework and Java Platform. A Common Components & Applications branch helps identify common components and applications.
The SOA effort met plenty of resistance at first. Developers and managers within the ministries resisted the idea of sharing and reusing each other's services and applications. As Huxter put it, "to provide service in a common way threatens your ability to control how you provide service. You're putting your eggs in someone else's basket."
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