Within a couple of days of each other two very different organization starting to talk about the success they have achieved from moving to SOA: Wachovia, the 4th largest bank in the US and the District of Columbia.
A couple of year back, Wachovia embarked on what was understood to be a major investment and organizational shift – an investment strongly backed by the CEO of the corporate and investment banking division. It is also possibly the largest deployed SOA project in investment banking (that I am aware of at least). The remit reported in InfoWorld was to “Rock the boat, change everything, and build a multihundred million dollar, end-to-end, services-oriented development and delivery platform”.
Clearly, this was a project that followed the dream formula – the most senior sponsor signing up to stay the course. Also clear is that Wachovia believes that it is bearing fruit delivering more quickly and at much lower cost the types of custom apps that investment banks build all the time to support trading in new and ever more complex types of financial product.
In contrast, D.C. followed what is probably a more common approach – they had a serious organizational challenge that simply could not be easily fixed with the old point-to-point approach to integration: The city needed to address the crime rate and to do this the city agencies needed to work more closely together and this meant that they needed to integrate better.
Unfortunately, this integration required the 370+ data sources to be connected together. The solution was to make this the start of a SOA and implement based on an ESB (from SeeBeyond – now part of Sun):
“A few years ago, more and more [organizations] started using ESBs for data-sharing purposes,” Adam Rubinson, deputy CTO of D.C. said. Federal customers in particular have used this approach to unlock older databases.
The benefits were again clear and matched what other government agencies moving to SOA have found: It saved money in unexpected places – in this case because they were able to identify vacant properties and collect the higher taxes due on those properties. An important lesson for anybody migrating for SOA - regularly review you RoI model to ensure that you are picking up these unexpected benefits along your path to SOA.
D.C.'s experience echoes what I have seen happening in other US criminal justice organizations at state level and in the UK where the national Criminal Justice IT organization (CJIT) has been spearheading similar initiatives over the last few years.
For more details, the story is here for Wachovia and here for D.C.
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