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The National Association of State CIOs (NASCIO) recently published a research brief entitled “Service Oriented Architecture: An enabler of the Agile Enterprise in State Government”. Although targeting government, much of what it says applies to any large organization and as such it provides a good succinct summary of the case for SOA. The fact that the US Department of Justice in particular has chosen to sponsor NASCIO’s enterprise architecture initiative, of which this is a part, is not surprising given the fit many people see between what enterprise architecture in general and SOA in particular can deliver and what justice networks need to do in terms of integration.

As I have said before the justification for SOA in government is clear: an environment consisting of numerous complex organizations and the increasing need to integrate rapidly across and within these organizations requires a high degree of integration agility such as promised by SOA. As the report puts it:

“In today’s world, government leaders expect to be able to move quickly, using all information appropriate to make effective choices that benefit constituents. Enablement of this expectation requires an organizational culture that embraces the sharing of assets and information.”

It is also nice to see some positive deployment stories showing quick return on investment – and of course as they report rightly points out these are not solely due to SOA, improving project management also plays a role.

“This particular project [in Chicago] saw immediate return on investment in multiple departments, for example, an increase of 20% in parking permit revenues and collection of outstanding parking violation collections.”

The collection of fines is a major problem for governments world-wide. As a SOA starting-point, it has a number of benefits: the return on investment is obvious and it is at its heart an integration problem: linking between applications to complete the business process.

As I said at the beginning, the report also covers much of the usual ground – SOA is an architecture and although building on previous approaches, it is new in significant ways. It is particularly clear when it explains SOA’s relationship with enterprise architecture more generally:

“The objectives and ultimate outcome of successful SOA is already embedded in the philosophy of enterprise architecture. The concepts of sharing, and reuse within both the business and technology areas of the organization have been around for sometime. Maybe what is really going on with the “advent” of “SOA” is that there is finally an understanding of the value of architecture, reuse, and services.”

And finally, before recommending that anybody interested in SOA and government go read the report, I will pull out one last quote:

“SOA focuses IT on being business driven. The underlying assumption in SOA is that not everything in technology can be the same, so standard methods and processes must be defined to enable disparate technologies to communicate, regardless of manufacturer or language.”

Posted by rbradley in Government • Market trends |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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