How the Peace Corps Became Even More Service Oriented

When most people think of the US Peace Corps, images of volunteers drilling wells and building schools in impoverished corners of the globe come to mind. Service oriented to the hilt, in the old-fashion sense of the phrase. This view is accurate, but these efforts still require a information technology infrastructure to best allocate and deliver its resources.

Until recently, that was provided by a mainframe system sitting in a silo in Washington, DC. A new report in Government Computing News describes how the Peace Corps moved to a service-oriented architecture methodologies to help keep track of and provide information services to its varied overseas activities.

Ram Murthy, director of application systems at the Peace Corps, recognized that a highly distributed organization -- spread across 70 countries -- needed a far more distributed IT infrastructure than the mainframe system it formerly relied on. Overseas users were unable to access the mainframe.

As is the case within many organizations public and private, Murthy encountered plenty of headwinds. Government managers were skeptical of the value of SOA to an organization such as the Peace Corps, because they thought SOA required 24x7 connectivity to Web services, and many Peace Corps officials were in areas that didn't even have electricity. Murphy successfully countered that the emphasis of the SOA wouldn't be on providing constant connectivity, but providing services when they are called. A more asynchronous view, if you will.

“We use the same principles of SOA, breaking it up into multilayer data services, business services and so on. But what we’ve also done is make sure that the framework supports disconnected mode,” Murthy said.

The Peace Corps' SOA effort began in 2006, when Murthy’s team was authorized $1 million in funding to start moving applications off the mainframe into a more distributed computing environment based on the .NET framework. The result was three applications that support posts and volunteers in the field: Crime and Incident Reporting, Site Enhancement and Development, and the Volunteer Information Database Application (VIDA).

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