Two Quick-Win SOA Projects

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March 07, 2007

Two Quick-Win SOA Projects

"Two SOA Projects That Can Pay for Themselves in Six Months"

Now, there's an eye-catching headline if I ever saw one. (Okay, it probably doesn't rank up there with "I Was Abducted by Space Aliens," but you know what I mean.)

Measuring -- let alone achieving -- ROI from SOA projects is an inexact science, and in most cases, the payback from SOA is likely to be long term, because SOA is a long-term journey that gradually begins to involve and deliver value one business unit at a time. (Dave Linthicum, however, has done a great job of showing us how to estimate that costs of an SOA project.)

Dave and other experts also point out that many small-scale, incremental SOA projects can deliver some "quick wins," which is important for building support and involvement for SOA across the enterprise.

In this article, IBM's Sandy Carter -- who also just published a new book called The New Language of Business: SOA & Web 2.0 (details here)-- cites two examples of these quick wins that can help build an SOA constituency, and perhaps even spring an executive evangelist or two:

A centralized delivery-date service. How many times have you been given the wrong date on an order you were expecting? One retailer was struggling with a fulfillment chain that comprised multiple systems - each of which could update the promised delivery date for an order. However, when someone changed a delivery date in one of the many fulfillment applications, the information wasn't consistently updated in the order-processing system. The result, naturally, was customer confusion, and mangled delivery schedules.

The solution was to implement a centralized delivery date service -- a SOAP over HTTP service managed by an ESB. Now, when a delivery date is changed, the fulfillment system sends a delivery-change notification to this event-driven service through ESB, and as a result, the order system database - and any other system that subscribes to this service - is immediately updated. The total effort to create two centralized services and build an ESB required four developers for four months, Carter said.

Charge dispute service. Have you ever disputed a credit card charge and wondered why it sometimes took months to resolve? Maybe SOA could speed things up. Carter cites the example of a financial services organization had a manual-intensive process for handling disputed charges from customers of its large retail partners. When a retail customer disputed a transaction, the financial services organization would manually print all transactions and send them through ground mail to the customer to identify which transactions were being challenged. The customer would then have to sign these papers and send them back through ground mail to the financial services organization, which would then package them and send selected documents to the retail institution. After this paperwork was received, the retail institution would decide whether the charge should be removed. This process could take up to 20 days to complete and typically cost the organizations involved between $400 and $700 per transaction.

Carter reports that the financial services organization deployed a service in front of its core transaction system that now enables retail partners to transmit dispute claims to the financial services organization on behalf of the partners' retail customers. To register a dispute, customers now simply log into the retail institution's Website and view a list of transactions that have posted to their account. Customers can then select the transactions they wish to dispute. The Website sends this request to the financial services organization's transaction-dispute service. The authentication that customers provide while logging on to the Web site enables the financial services organization to eliminate the need for paper documentation with a handwritten signature.

Carter reports that the transaction-dispute process now averages a total of three hours, reduced from 20 days, and costs only US $40 to $70 per transaction, instead of the previous $400-$700 per transaction, representing a 90 percent reduction in costs. "Automating this process by creating a centralized service helped enable the organization to realize estimated cost savings of more than $200 million per year," she says.

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