Joe McKendrick, ebizQ's SOA in Action Blogger, is a nationally published author and consultant
with deep knowledge and insights regarding trends and developments in
the technology industry. He is a contributing editor to a number of
national and international publications and Websites including
Database Trends & Applications, ZDNet, and Webservices.Org. He also
serves as analyst for Evans Data Corp., and is lead analyst for Evans'
Web services and enterprise development management issues surveys.
SOA in Action Blog
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« SOA Leaders Speak Out: This is Only the Beginning | Main | SOA Gains Altitude at United » June 06, 2007Safeco Crosses New Boundaries with SOA "The learning curve is steep. It is not so much any given aspect which is difficult to learn, it is rather the sheer number of technologies and tools one must be familiar with to execute the complete project." Early last year, Safeco, an insurance company, launched an SOA initiative intended to support new product development and business process improvements. Members of the company's SOA team provided this account of the company's SOA effort. The goal of the SOA project was to create an enterprise component which can process all matching requests by comparing Motor Vehicle Registry (MVR) records to policy records. There were often manual processes associated with the MVR matching process, the SOA team wrote. "A customer service representative will manually review the record and policy information to decide whether the policy needs to be re-priced. If this is the case, an updated policy is sent to the agent and the customer. About 35% of MVR records match the policy information." The company chose Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation for the Enterprise Services tier, IBM WebSphere However, the greatest challenge to this project wasn't technology, but the fact that "new products, solutions and improvements are often specified without consideration for department or system boundaries," the team said. The SOA team also found that while the success of SOA depends on business involvement, it doesn't pay to try to get businesspeople too wrapped up in the technical aspects of the project. "From our perspective, it seems difficult to have the expectation to involve business users in modeling activities. An experienced business analyst can easily translate business requirements into business process models. This model is generally not deployable in the process engine as-is. An integration developer needs to be involved to make the process executable." The SOA team advises that initially, SOA projects "should be treated as traditional implementation projects. Over time, there is value in providing an as-deployed model to a business team." The Safeco SOA team saw at least four major benefits coming out of their efforts: Legacy Reuse: "We could reuse legacy code that was otherwise impossible to reuse without exposing it as a service using Web services technologies," they observed. Interoperability: "Web services technologies enable interoperability, which in turn is a key success factor when building composite applications." Rapid Turnaround: "We were able to deliver a complex solution integrating over five systems in less than eight weeks with a team of four developers, two QAs and two architects." Very Few Lines of Code Required: "The process implementation was done with less than 20 lines of code which were written for a special mapping capability. The assembly between the process component, the services and the human CSR was achieved with SCA. These capabilities demonstrate that a model driven approach is effective to implement real-world solutions and this approach eliminates over 90 percent of the code at the process level. If we were to code this process implementation using a traditional application model, (e.g. J2EE, or .Net), without an orchestration engine, this implementation would have taken several thousand lines of code." Posted by joemckendrick in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry:
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