SOA in Action Blog

In these volatile times, it's good to hear that government agencies continue to step up to the plate to help keep people in their homes. And it's really nice to hear that service oriented architecture is helping with this process.

A report in Government Computing News describes how the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is moving to SOA to better leverage its large inventory of legacy systems. HUD has been around since the "war on poverty" was launched in the 1960s, and no doubt has a lot of baked-in legacy processes and systems on which it operates.

And the agency is pressing these systems to do more and more. During the first quarter of this year, HUD backed $30 billion of mortgage insurance. Now, in the third quarter that figure has more than doubled to $70 billion. HUD also backed about 200,000 mortgages in the first quarter; the agency now is up to 400,000.

HUD has multiple legacy systems, 200 of which are supported by multiple-point products. "We have tons of business requirements coming in. We don't have time, short term, necessarily, to get rid of all these legacy systems," said Lisa Schlosser, chief information officer of HUD, at a recent conference.

HUD needed agility, and fast. "Handling that type of volume requires a move to an agile environment where applications can be developed rapidly," she is quoted as saying. "The days are gone where it takes five years to build systems to meet [agencies?] requirements. New leaders coming into government have little patience for that."

HUD is building an enterprise service bus that will allow users to more efficiently access services and applications from those legacy systems. "SOA services are really helping us get data to the right people at the right time while we continue to modernize those legacy systems. A 20-year-old system is not going to be modernized over night."

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