As compliance became an necessary part of documenting IT operations, it created a flurry of new paperwork requirements. Lately, some companies have begun building SOA and Web services solutions to remove the new paperwork burden being placed upon them.
For many companies, manual efforts to extract data for compliance required generating reports for a particular quarter, then repeating the same steps again three months later.
"When an auditor would come in, and look at one of these processes, we would hand them a three-inch binder of paper, and they would look through it for exceptions to quiz you on," according to Mike Rulf, vice president of advanced engineering for USinternetworking, an on-demand hosting provider and AT&T subsidiary. "Auditors aren’t cheap, they charge pretty good bucks, and it takes a lot of time to go through that stack of paper."
The problem is pervasive. In a survey of 211 data center managers that I helped conduct and wrote for the Oracle Applications Users Group last year, we found nearly four out of 10 respondents from the largest enterprises say they are having difficulty extracting and combining data from multiple brands of enterprise applications, such as Oracle ERP/CRM/Financials, PeopleSoft, Hyperion, SAP, Siebel, and custom-developed. (A copy of the study is posted here).
There has got to be a better way. And SOA approaches offer a new way to streamline and automate compliance processes, and make them repeatable.
I recently had the opportunity to chat with Rulf, who provides services to large companies with multiple compliance reporting requirements. USinternetworking's pain point was its efforts to automate or manage business processes around systems audits, Rulf said. Many of USinternetworking's clients are large companies that require reporting on the ERP and financial systems that they outsourced. "Our processes tended to span a lot of several commercial packages -- we run PeopleSoft for financials and CRM, and Ariba for procurement. We also have a lot of internal systems that we use for monitoring, management, and event reporting."
USinternetworking deployed SOA with several components of Oracle Fusion Middleware to capture and leverage the information coming out of these systems into standardized cross-system services, Rulf explained.
As part of the modeling process for USinternetworking's SOA, Rulf and his team went around and "talk to all these people that in the past we were shepparding binders of information to." Often, these individuals would take the paperwork dropped on their desks, and re-key the information into another script they were running for reporting purposes, which resulted in more paperwork being generated. "We found with SOA, we could take all these little chucks of code, and build these standardized wrappers that can be presented as Web services."
Rulf added that compliance mandates are a good way to get support from management for SOA initiatives. "The primary driver behind our SOA is the process automation. It gave us economies of scale. If we’ve got something that we do 20 times a day, or even just 20 times a week, by having a standardized way of doing it, where you manage just to the exceptions, there’s significant cost savings just with having that available to you."
Ultimately, Rulf said, "when you talk to a C-level executive, or somebody in management, they want to know how quickly they can get to the point where they sign a customer to get to the first invoice. They don’t care that I sent 15 things through PeopleSoft, and sent 50 orders in Ariba. They care about, 'how fast did I get these people through?' 'Where did I have errors?' 'Where else can I streamline that process flow?'"
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