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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« I'm from Your SOA Governance Board, and I'm Here to Help | Main | I'm an SOA Consultant, and I'm Here to Help... » August 09, 2007In Ontario, SOA Has Been in the Works for Almost a Decade Having just spent time in Toronto, I was interested to see this new story on the Ontario provincial government's implementation of service-oriented architecture. Interestingly still, Ontario has been at it for close to a decade, calling it their "common components" approach. "For us, SOA is more a re-branding of an approach we've had in play since about 1999," Ron Huxter, the province's chief technology officer, is quoted as saying. Ontario's SOA didn't start out as a huge, concerted drive to service-orientation. Rather, there were many developments along the way involving different departments and applications. "It was more the realization of a thousand points of light than a single thunderbolt," Huxter said. Things started in 1998,when the government consolidated 24 ministry IT departments, creating eight new IT organizations responsible for "clusters" of ministries with similar or related responsibilities and ways of doing business. According to the article, the new IT organizations were charged with "harvesting as much reuse as possible." In addition, 24 different HR and ERP systems were replaced by single enterprise-wide systems. The province's SOA effort includes SOA centers of excellence that develop and implement shared tools and platforms based on .NET framework and Java Platform. A Common Components & Applications branch helps identify common components and applications. The SOA effort met plenty of resistance at first. Developers and managers within the ministries resisted the idea of sharing and reusing each other's services and applications. As Huxter put it, "to provide service in a common way threatens your ability to control how you provide service. You're putting your eggs in someone else's basket." Posted by joemckendrick in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry:
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