SOA was going strong in 2007, and companies discovered a myriad of uses for this emerging methodology. For some companies, it was a way to avoid a costly ERP system upgrade, while for others, it was a way to achieve faster time to market. Here are some more world-class examples of how and where SOA made a difference over the past year:
As an end-run around a major ERP systems upgrade. Dow Corporation SOA-enabled its SAP R/2 system, making an upgrade to R/3 unnecessary. Dow's "Next Enterprise Architecture (NEA)" is based on SAP's Netweaver and MySAP. The SOA implementation will allow Dow to develop new systems while running existing SAP R/2 and in-house systems, which it plans to replace over the next 10 years. The first five applications Dow is developing as part of NEA will provide a highly integrated view of Dow's operations worldwide. In addition, managers and staff will gain easier access to the information they need, and systems development staff will be able to respond to their changing needs more quickly.
To automate manual processes. Safeco, an insurance company, launched an SOA initiative intended to support new product development and business process improvements. The goal of the SOA project was to create an enterprise component which can process all matching requests by comparing Motor Vehicle Registry (MVR) records to policy records. Most of the time, there were manual processes associated with the MVR matching process, since records did not match online. The Safeco SOA team saw at least four major benefits coming out of their efforts, including legacy reuse, greater interoperability, more rapid turnaround (solution delivery within eight weeks), and very few lines of code required to accomplish integration. "The process implementation was done with less than 20 lines of code which were written for a special mapping capability," Safeco's SOA team reported.
To track the miles. Aeroplan, originally the frequent-flier plan for Air Canada, used SOA to expand its reach to both consumers and business partners in supporting customer loyalty rewards programs. Aeroplan's mainframe-based systems were originally built around supporting frequent-flier miles, until Air Canada spun the company off two years ago. Aeroplan's challenge was to expand its Its range of offerings beyond what was a limited number of flights on Air Canada routes. Enter Web services, which helped Aeroplan integrate with partners to expand its program beyond airline seats, while still leveraging its mainframe as a back-end transaction engine, but add service layers for interacting with business partners and consumers.
To run a regional government more efficiently. The Ontario provincial government has been running an SOA-based infrastructure for close to a decade, calling it their "common components" approach. 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. 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. 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.
To untangle spaghetti architecture. Brokerage giant Morgan Stanley employed SOA techniques to fix its internal IT mess. The firm had a lot of the usual issues hold back many organizations -- stovepiped systems, branch offices that wouldn't, or couldn't, communicate or share files, and a corporate culture in which developers were accustomed to doing everything themselves. The company turned to an SOA approach to better reuse IT assets and to provide more and better performance data, made available through dashboards and portals, so it could better track the profitability of individual branches and product lines.
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