SOA in the Real World 

SOA in the Field (Part I of III)

By Biffle French, IT Architect, IBM , 10/10/2005

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Business Drivers and Project Goals

Businesses need to take full advantage of existing legacy systems in order to function. They have invested significant sums and long periods of development and upgrades to get the systems to where they are today. At the same time, businesses need to improve their technological capabilities by integrating and refactoring those existing capabilities in ways that were never envisioned when systems were originally built. Changing environments create constant pressures to do business better and more effectively – often with a smaller staff.

One of the common approaches that businesses take today is to add or improve self-service capabilities. Self-service is a big money saver, since it can help reduce call center staffing. However, systems that are useful in a call center setting are often not adequate for self-service, since the users require training in order to understand how to perform the tasks they need to perform. Many legacy UIs are green screen and predate the science of “user friendly” user interfaces.

Our client is a large company that wanted to test the promise of Service Oriented Architecture as an approach to solving a business problem. They wanted to improve their online self-service capability. The initial targeted users are internal workers who are specialists in performing a specific job, and who rely on an eclectic set of legacy systems of various generations to perform their tasks.

In many cases, a user has to log on to one system, find an item of information, then log on to another system (using a different userid/password) and use that data item as a key to another lookup. The disadvantages of this approach are obvious: it is slow, it is difficult to learn and it clearly does not promise anything in the realm of self-service.

The goal of this project was to create a “Service Layer” that provided easy access to a refactored set of services. Those services would all be accessible as Web services. In addition, a user accessing the services across the portal would only be required to authenticate once, and any background authentication would be handled automatically. So the view from the portal is simple, seamless and unified, even though at the back end it is complex, heterogeneous and decidedly not unified.

SOA Architectural Style

IBM’s SOA Architectural Style adds a “Service Layer” between existing systems at the back end and their ultimate clients at the front end. The key enabler of this approach is Web services technology.

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