SOA in Action

There's been a lot of rancor across the industry and blogosphere about the viability of SOA from the top down -- instigated as part of a huge business change -- versus bottom-up, in which individual SOA efforts pop up across business units, with the possibility of federating these efforts down the road.

But, sometimes, it's just so much easier when the CEO is laying down the law. That was the experience with Farm Credit Canada (FCC), a provider of financial services for Canadian agricultural businesses. FCC's approach was very much driven from the top down, instigated by the CEO, who brought in a new CIO specifically to move to SOA. As a result, the establishment of SOA principles for developing and managing applications was in place within 90 days.

FCC employed SOA methodologies to restructure itself from a silo organization, with each silo supporting applications for a particular business function, to a “service-centered” model, where applications are constructed according to service oriented architecture (SOA) principles.

As described in a new report in MIS Quarterly Executive, the transformation of FCC to a process-centric organization is scheduled for completion by the end of 2011. FCC moved to SOA with a six-step process:

1) CEO driven: "The CEO initiated a culture change initiative that underpinned his vision of creating a customer-centric organization."

2) Process revolution: "The organization focused on what needed to be done to integrate the corporation’s processes and systems to enable it to provide a great customer experience."

3) IT itself was transformed. "The CIO assessed the current state of the IT organization, and all current IT projects were halted while this was done." Siloed approaches were abandoned in favor of an architecture-centric approach supported by SOA principles.

4) A proof of concept was undertaken "by implementing a carefully chosen business process with SOA."

5) Governance: "The organization undertook a detailed redesign of other processes, and working through the governance issues of managing a process-driven IT organization."

6) The benefits to date of transforming the IT function and its technology were articulated. The CIO identified a range of benefits, from improved communication between the business and IT, to the development of reusable IT assets.

Complete PDF available here. (Free registration required.)

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Open source platforms offer a compelling value proposition for SOA deployments, and two case studies presented at the recent Red Hat summit demonstrate how this value can be realized.

Writing in CIO, CIO's Esther Schindler provides accounts from SJ, the Swedish railroad, and North State Communications.

SJ integrated its ticket sales with online auctions, to move seats not sold 48 hours before departure would be auctioned online. The railroad turned to SOA to make this capability possible within its enterprise framework.

North State Communications turned to SOA to facilitate a billing system transformation. The company employed ESBs and JBoss to automate the way it makes services available to customers.

Pierre Fricke, director of SOA product line management for JBoss, said companies are only just starting to consider open source platforms for SOA. He expects the trend to accelerate by 2010. (Thanks to Matt Assay for the pointer.)

Open source is bringing SOA capabilities to what have been unserved or underserved markets -- such as small to medium businesses. Since the inception of SOA in its current form about five years ago, large commercial vendors have concentrated on the high-margin, deep-pocketed companies. Open source commoditizes SOA offerings, making it more affordable to more companies.

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Southwest Florida is a booming region (real estate bust or not), but there are limits on growth -- particularly as it relates to the availability of water. That's why any and all new projects need to be cleared through the Southwest Florida Water Management District. Think of it as a governance board for water management.

The District originally managed data and transactions on a mainframe system, but in planning for is Water Management Information System (WMIS) -- designed to automate and streamline the paper- and time-intensive well-construction permitting process -- it was decided to move off the mainframe and onto a distributed system developed to support SOA approaches. For the few thousand transactions the system would be processing each day, the mainframe would be overkill, said a District IT manager.

Jeffrey Schwartz, writing in Redmond Developer News, describes how the District set out building its SOA-based system, designed to replace the mainframe system by 2010. The new system will better automate the permit application and approval process, while providing Web access and supporting geospatial data. The agency used Microsoft .NET to create a SOA to integrate Unix, Linux and host-based systems. New applications would be written in C#. The solution also ties together disparate Cobol applications, Oracle databases, an enterprise content-management repository and a geographic information system.

Challenges stemmed from the move from green-screens (the mainframe's 3270 terminal environment) to GUI-based environments. As Schwartz noted, the District's IT team had its work cut out for it in terms of nintegration of disparate systems, finding and retaining developers skilled in .NET and Visual Studio, and the cultural change that was brought about in the move from green screens. "Getting different groups to agree on business rules was an additional challenge," the article observed.

The District reports that since implementing phase one, well-construction permitting (WCP), the District has had 86 percent of its nearly 17,000 permits processed electronically. "We can get a better picture of what's getting permitted; that's something we could never do before," said one District executive. "We have to handle a lot less permits in-house and we can now do some risk management in permitting." The District also says the WCP phase has saved the equivalent of one staff person's time over a year.

Reuse is another benefit that is emerging from the project. It is estimated that 35 percent of the Web services developed for the initial permitting app are reusable. Many of the geospatial data types likewise can be shared, along with database structures such as contractor data.

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When most people think of the US Peace Corps, images of volunteers drilling wells and building schools in impoverished corners of the globe come to mind. Service oriented to the hilt, in the old-fashion sense of the phrase. This view is accurate, but these efforts still require a information technology infrastructure to best allocate and deliver its resources.

Until recently, that was provided by a mainframe system sitting in a silo in Washington, DC. A new report in Government Computing News describes how the Peace Corps moved to a service-oriented architecture methodologies to help keep track of and provide information services to its varied overseas activities.

Ram Murthy, director of application systems at the Peace Corps, recognized that a highly distributed organization -- spread across 70 countries -- needed a far more distributed IT infrastructure than the mainframe system it formerly relied on. Overseas users were unable to access the mainframe.

As is the case within many organizations public and private, Murthy encountered plenty of headwinds. Government managers were skeptical of the value of SOA to an organization such as the Peace Corps, because they thought SOA required 24x7 connectivity to Web services, and many Peace Corps officials were in areas that didn't even have electricity. Murphy successfully countered that the emphasis of the SOA wouldn't be on providing constant connectivity, but providing services when they are called. A more asynchronous view, if you will.

“We use the same principles of SOA, breaking it up into multilayer data services, business services and so on. But what we’ve also done is make sure that the framework supports disconnected mode,” Murthy said.

The Peace Corps' SOA effort began in 2006, when Murthy’s team was authorized $1 million in funding to start moving applications off the mainframe into a more distributed computing environment based on the .NET framework. The result was three applications that support posts and volunteers in the field: Crime and Incident Reporting, Site Enhancement and Development, and the Volunteer Information Database Application (VIDA).

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Oracle's Dave Chappell has always done a great job of linking SOA efforts to measurable business results, and he recently posted an account of a busy online service that was able to integrate its widespread base of customer systems into a well-integrated service layer.

Move Inc., a growing online real estate provider, had what Oracle's Dave deemed a "tall order:" consolidating disparate applications across two business units into an enterprise CRM solution that could provide a single, accurate view of customer data to improve efficiencies and automate auditing, billing and fulfillment processes.

Move Inc. (formerly Homestore, Inc.) provides information on real estate property listings (homes and apartments), moving, home and garden and home finance through its network of online sites, which includes www.realtor.com, www.welcomewagon.com, and www.moving.com.

Tall order indeed. As Dave describes it, Move had systems and touchpoints all over the map. CRM applications were built on .NET, and there were numerous disparate systems and manual touchpoints built to support various business functions for CRM.

The company developed a SOA that focused on re-usability of services, with business processes were at least as efficient if not better than what the current systems offered. Using standard WSDL interfaces, Oracle BPEL PM and Oracle ESB were used to extend the reach and normalize the integration across Siebel CRM, PeopleSoft Enterprise Financial Management and other systems both internal and external

The consolidated customer database is intended to provide support for existing sales activities, order capture, integration with fulfillment systems, integration of customer usage from Web sites into Siebel, and integration to PeopleSoft Billing. The solution involves the use of BPEL, Web services, ESB Mediation, application adapters, and canonical data models.

The project took six months to implement and deploy, Dave reports -- actually, pretty good timing for such an effort. Move was able to achieve both quicker and real-time integration across these systems, and saw a reduction in cost of ownership on existing applications.

"It's always great to hear about successful adoption of SOA, and its particularly exciting when its being used for what you'd think," Dave remarked.

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Everyone considers their systems to be "special" in many ways. They represent years of planning, installations, and modifications. However, sometimes "specialness" can get in the way of the ability to deliver agility and flexibility to business clients.

At the recent Tibco TUCON users' conference in San Francisco, Allstate's vice president of technical solutions, Anthony Abbatista, described how his company managed to automate most of its systems and processes in the 1960s and 1970s with what was in it's time a new generation of "special applications." Everything from policy administration to underwriting was captured on the company's array of mainframe computers.

Of course, application designers in these first waves of automation could never have imagined the uses that their systems would be getting nowadays. They never could have envisioned parts of these systems being opened up to the world via the Web.

These systems, Abbatista explained, were all hand-crafted and hand-coded. Commercial off-the-shelf applications just didn't exist in the 1960s and 1970s. However, the Allstate commitment to rolling its own applications continued right up to recent years. At Allstate everything was custom-built, "and we were proud of that," he said. "everything was very 'special,' with limited reuse."

Adding to the complexity and inflexibility, the company had a plethora of systems and vendors for the commercial solutions it did start buying. "Up until five years ago, we never met a software vendor we didn't like," Abbatista said.

The company, which now has $156 billion in assets and 17 million customers, always had plenty of resources for information technology. However, the company needed more responsive and agile IT solutions to succeed in an increasingly competitive environment for the insurance industry.

"When I first arrived at Allstate, we had three to five different integration platforms," Abbatista related. "We had an executive IT board that mirrored the military model, run by 'generals.' We had an abundance of point-to-point integration."

Allstate knew that it needed to embark on a more consolidated, service oriented architecture if its systems were to continue to deliver value.

Areas being modernized include claims processing, which was spread across nine different mainframe-based silos tied together by custom-built middleware. The company employed a standard enterprise service bus to handle claims processing through a single interface across the entire enterprise.

Another initiative was to establish a common integration layer for the company's fast-growing data environment. "Our data hubs are growing 30%-40% a year," Abbastista said. The company also pared down its vendor list to a "handful of strategic partners," numbering 12 to 15 vendors, he said.

Changing the organizational culture was another challenge, Abbatista remarked. "We had to make a substantial commitment to technology, skills, and also selling integrated teams that we had a better approach," he said. SOA governance was also tied to the operations of the procurement organization. This helped provide better visibility of available services, as well as increase reuse, he said. "How many error-logging services did we really need?" he asked.

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Talk about legacy. Up until recently, both Lufthansa and United Airlines were using a 40-year old reservation system, written in Assembly language.

Esther Schnidler, writing in CIO, describes how the airline migrated its green-screen-based system, which couldn't integrate with other systems and services.

Migrating the system to SOA, which covers the product suite for reservations, inventory and passenger check-in, is equivalent to a "heart transplant," said Shama Patel, business program manager of the SOA effort for United and Lufthansa, called Horizon Project.

The key to the project's success is good governance, Patel said. Along with a governance board supported by both airlines, a "Guidance Coalition" which brings IT and business employees together to interact and work on project milestones together. United also created a job title of "business engagement manager" to act as a point of contact between the IT project and the division.

Eventually, Lufthansa and United plan to roll out a common platform that can also be used by other members of the Star Alliance. "The modernization project will impact 20,000 people in 350 locations in a three- to four-year time frame, and it will touch 20 company divisions."

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There's been quite a bit of debate in the industry about whether SOA can deliver reasonable ROI within a reasonable timeframe. The consensus has been that it's going to take time, even years, for the benefits of SOA to take effect.

However, there are exceptions to every piece of accepted conventional wisdom. In the case of mergers and acquisitions, the payback from service-oriented architecture sometimes can be seen in a matter of months.

Tony Baer, who also an ebizQ contributor, has just posted this account at Manufacturing Business Technology, describing how a recent acquisition doubled Mohawk Fine Papers' manufacturing network doubled to six sites, and distribution network quadrupled to four warehouses.

From past experience, Mohawk's IT team knew how painful custom development and integration could be. As Paul Stamas, Mohawk's VP of IT, told Tony: "The biggest problem was managing all the interfaces. The failures in the previous integration were point-to-point connections that nobody owned." So Mohawk took a new tact -- SOA.

The company integrated its existing BPCS enterprise system with the Infor ShipLogix transportation management solution deployed recently to replace an older Logility application. And with a much larger production network, Mohawk also sought to tie BPCS into its Infor Datastream enterprise asset management system. (Note: BPCS was created and marketed by SSA Global, which was purchased by Infor in 2006. But just because a vendor is acquired doesn't make it any easier for a company to integrate the separate products.)

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According to a report in ComputerWeekly, consumer goods company Proctor & Gamble is working on an ambitious service oriented architecture that will provide aggregated data for the company's 32,000 managers.

To accomplish this, the company will be re-using up to half of its internally developed code across the organization, which will be made available as shared services across the enterprise.

The company has already rolled out SOA to 2,000 users, helping to achieve up to 25% of reuse, Terry McFadden, associate director for enterprise architecture at P&G.

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There's been a lot of debate and discussion across the industry as to whether SOA can deliver value to the business early on, or if its more of a long-term process.

For one company working with SOA methodologies for the past 10 years, there clearly has been a long-term benefit, in terms of economies of scale. The earliest services may have not been more cost effective than standard applications, but as SOA and reuse grew, these services grew cheaper and cheaper to use and administer.

Then again, a $5 billion logistics and trucking company ought to know plenty about economies of scale. It may cost $1,000 to ship one refrigerator from New York to Los Angeles, but cost a penny if it's intelligently bundled with another shipment. Why not apply this know-how to its information technology infrastructure?

One of the best and earliest examples of heavy-duty implementations of Web services and SOA is Con-Way Inc., a logistics and trucking company. I first spoke with them and documented their efforts back in late 2004. At the time, Con-Way had already been evolving an SOA infrastructure for several years, enabling its seven separate business units to share standardized customer-facing applications. At that time, Con-Way had about 20 coarse-grain business components, such as a shipment component, purchasing component, and customer component.

SearchSOA's Rich Seeley just spoke with the folks at Con-Way, and, needless to say, the company has come a long way since 2004. For one, revenues at the freight transportation company were only making a measly $2 billion when I last spoke with them.

Shibashis Mukherjee, Con-Way lead enterprise architect, told Rich how things came about, dating back to the 1990s, when the company embarked on a component-based methodology to expose COBOL mainframe applications as services. The company began building various Web services earlier this decade.

Con-Way set out not knowing how much services would be reused -- but this was very much their design goal. . "When we built services at that point in time, we built every piece of functionality as a reusable piece of code," Mukherjee said. "We had no idea whether it was going to be reused or not." However, reuse across the company's various business lines took off.

The result was a multiplier effect as SOA gradually took hold in the corporate culture. "It took a couple of projects to see all the benefits," Mukherjee said. "You don't generally see the benefits in the first project you do. We also had executive management buy-in and we had a long-term vision. So as project after project is done, our development time was cut as we reused components built by the previous projects."

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Business-IT alignment... Has a day gone by over the past ten years that we have not heard that phrase?

While it seems to be a constant but elusive dream -- like peace on Earth -- some companies indicate that SOA may be moving them closer to reality.

Fellow ebizQ colleague James Taylor, out at the IBM Impact confab this week, provides an account of an end-user customer panel on the ever-vexing challenge of business-IT alignment. Is service-oriented architecture helping to bring about some of this alignment?

A panel of corporate practitioners talked about their SOA efforts, and the impact SOA was having on alignment -- a positive impact, by the way. James reports that Randy Wallace from Michelin said one of his company's biggest challenges is "B2B with lots of billers to interface directly in their order management systems so, for instance, allow dealers to integrate orders with Michelin. They are currently evolving their order-to-cash system using Process Server and SOA."

Who much alignment has Michelin seen? According to Wallace, the company has come a long way, "from having a very small percentage of IT spend aligned with key business goals (6%) to one that is much more so (81%)."

That's pretty impressive. Wallace cited some examples: "For instance, in the past business units in different regions picked i2 and Manugistics at the same time and both were implemented resulting in separate systems. A stronger governance process and overall architecture are now established, driven by business ambitions and regularly updated. Far fewer and more focused projects as a result. Senior executive user satisfaction has risen steadily."

Austin Waldron from Health Care Services Corporation (HCSC) said his company's "focus is on using SOA in legacy modernization where many disparate systems are being replaced by a unified set of shared services. The governance issues seem to have been key for HCSC."

Waldron also talked about moving closer to business-IT alignment. "They had some years of IT spend focused more on basic IT infrastructure (security, robustness etc) but now investments much more driven by the business strategy."

Another panalist talked about more alignment at the front lines of the business. Jeff Auker from The Hartford "talked about challenge of consumer front-ends. Consumers working directly with The Hartford now expect a much more interactive online experience for sales and service - this is being driven by GEICO and Progressive’s campaigns. SOA is key because they have some front-ends that are tightly integrated with very old back-ends and SOA let’s them decouple them."

Thanks again to James Taylor for this report .

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Yes, as we've been preaching incessantly on these pages for the past couple of years, governance does make the difference between SOA success and ending up with Just a Bunch of Web Services, or JBOWS.

In a new ComputerWorld report, Carphone Warehouse, a mobile phone retailer based in the UK, credits a new design-time governance system with boosting the adoption of its SOA effort, now in its third year.

The company was experiencing many of the issues that occur with JBOWS architectures, such as creating duplicate services, and resorting to time-consuming manual checks of services. More than half of the service designs were not in compliance with corporate standards.

The company recently acted to remedy the duplication and confusion by putting an automated governance system in place. Right away, things started falling in place. For starters, 95 percent of the service designs now being put into production conform to governance standards, according to Pawel Maszczyk, enterprise architect at Carphone Warehouse.

Even better, the article relates, by avoiding accidental duplication of services, the automated governance system (from HP Systinet) is projected to deliver savings of £526,000 over three years. Another £93,750 will come from time saved managing governance, and £113,500 from time saved reviewing services. That's a total of £733,000, or the equivalent of US$1.5 million at the current exchange rate.

“We gained visibility. If you’re looking for a service that does something in particular, you can identify it and reuse it quickly," according to Maszczyk. “It also automates processes, so we know if there is a change to approve. Before, we had to go and find out if there was something that we needed to do. It automatically carries out mundane checks so we can launch new services more quickly.”

The company plans to put automated runtime governance in place as its next goal.

As always, Maszczyk pointed out, the organizational issues are the most vexing in moving SOA forward. Adopting SOA also means adopting a new “mentality” on IT, he said. “It’s not an easy change. You have to explain what you’re trying to achieve."

If the organization sees SOA evolving rather than JBOWS, it's much more likely to sign on to the effort -- perhaps even with greater enthusiasm.

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More evidence that SOA implementations are moving closer to an enterprise data management role: The Stanwell Corporation recently began a project intended to integrate and provide quick access to data currently stored in siloed IT systems.

In a new ComputerWorld interview, Stanwell enterprise technology architect Greg Behrendt said the new platform will synchronize data from numerous sources throughout the enterprise and transform it into real-time information. "We will have access to information we can act upon and update straight away; this will save us time and money by streamlining business processes and accessing information from one location," he is quoted as saying. Stanwell turned to BEA's AquaLogic Enterprise Service Bus and data services platform to undertake the project.

Perhaps the Stanwell and BEA folks read ebizQ's own David Kelly a few months back, when he so succinctly made the SOA-data connection a few months back, observing that "any organization considering or pursuing SOA should also be creating a data services strategy....Simply put, putting together the right data services are an important strategic investment for organizations pursuing SOA."

While data warehouses and data marts are intended to accomplish this de-silozation of information, they need middleware support to effectively disperse the data to the right parts of the business through the right applications. "There's an ever-growing need for delivering data, especially from multiple, disjointed sources, in real-time," David explained. Thus, data needs to be moved closer to the applications, and applications need to be moved closer to the data, and somewhere in the middle they meet. What a killer role for SOA.

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At Delta Airlines, SOA is cutting the cost of ownership by half for its various applications and systems. That's good news, of course, but the company's experience with proactive governance also provides some valuable pointers for other companies wrestling with the politics of SOA.

Delta's SOA has been under development for more than 10 years and is now its third phase, says Bret Martin, principal enterprise architecture for Delta Technology Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Delta Airlines.

In a session (registration required) at a recent online conference put on by Tibco, Martin said that phase one of what the airline calls its "Digital Nervous System," or DNS, commenced with proprietary and home-grown integration hooks in 1996. As SOA and Web services evolved earlier this decade, Delta focused on bringing DNS in line with industry standards such as SOAP over HTTP, delivered through an enterprise service bus at the back end.

Now, in the latest phase of the effort, the goal is to see that "SOA is infused with the enterprise," Martin related. "SOA is a way of life for implementing business applications across the enterprise."

The greatest value Delta is seeing from SOA is reuse of IT assets and data, Martin pointed out. "Reuse is one of the big drivers for our SOA environment," he said. Delta's SOA, for example, is reusing the same customer and operational data across a range of systems, from the Delta.com Website to ticketing kiosks to ticketing counters and gate systems. "It allows check-in to happen in a uniform way," he explained. Another way services are being leveraged are by exposing services to vendors and partners, such as American Express or operations companies.

Delta engaged a cross-enterprise governance team to perform all the tasks that are expected from an SOA governance group: managing registry and repository in making sure that services are registered, defining the policies that are going to go into the deployment of a service, defining security, defining service-level agreements.

However, Delta recognized the value that the governance team was bringing beyond merely approving, registering, and managing services, Martin says. "Its not only registering services, but also trying to promote services that we already have defined, and have already put into production." This is essential, he said, because developers and architects aren't necessarily aware of what services are available out there, or where they can be found.

"What we needed is a governance organization that says they can help, 'here is a SOA business process, and is is how it can be implemented," says Martin. "Having a group that stands in front of those services, and matches business requirements to the services that we have… is a huge benefit."

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You ever hear about the "rent-a-patient" scheme hatched by a pair of unscrupulous doctors in the LA area? In this incredible-but-true scheme, the doctors performed unnecessary surgery on patients that were recruited by marketers with promises of cash or discounted cosmetic surgery procedures.

Patients were instructed by recruiters to describe false and exaggerated symptoms that were used to create medical charts used to make the surgical procedures appear to be justified. The doctors reportedly racked up claims totaling more than $2 million before being caught. Procedures performed on the otherwise normally healthy patients included colonoscopy, sinus surgeries and thoracic sympathectomy, commonly called "sweaty palm surgery."

Claims fraud gives many insurance carriers sweaty palms, as I documented in this recent article in Insurance Networking News. The good news is that technology -- in the form of analytics -- is providing carriers the tools to rapidly sift through claims data to connect the dots on suspicious activities. Time is of the essence -- claims must be paid within a certain period of time, and once the check is cut and mailed, it's difficult to get the money back.

Here's a role SOA can play as well. Sandy Carter, VP with IBM, just published details in CIO about how SOA is enabling MIB, the industry's largest fraud detection service that is used by nearly every North American life and health insurance carrier, to spot fraudulent activity.

Sandy relates that MIB, which has 500 members, can sift through files from a range of systems to help detect potential fraud among new applicants to insurance policies. MIB's systems can access the applicant's insurance and medical history; the proximity of marriage, establishment of a life insurance policy and a spouse's untimely death, and the frequency of auto accidents resulting in medical claims.

MIB is also employing SOA to "help build an online community among credit reporting agencies, healthcare and insurance providers, and government agencies by extracting the information that’s trapped in various software applications that are located inside and outside a company and bringing it together under one roof in a faster, more secure and economical way. This information helps create an accurate and comprehensive credit history profile while also adhering to industry regulations."

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You may have seen the amazing high-tech tools that the crews in the CSI crime series use to track identities and spot forensic evidence. In fact, the technology delivers a little too quickly and efficiently in TVland. But perhaps there is some service oriented architecture behind the scenes. It's definitely becoming the case in real-life police work.

ComputerWeekly reports that a UK-based police department is employing SOA to enable remote access to applications via a common, standardized interface.

The Wiltshire Police department commissioned a major redesign of its systems so officers and managers can use an SOA-based system as an interface to a dozen applications. Matt Bennion-Pedley, Wiltshire's financial director, said that the SOA ensures security, continuity and resilience against technology changes: "It insulates the applications themselves, making it easier to develop interfaces for new terminals and applications."

The SOA enables better access from mobile clients, and will provide access to administrative and investigative tools such as intelligence systems, the Police National Database, vehicle and criminal records, and photo files. There are also plans to enable DNA file access.

And hey, let's be careful out there.

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One of the coolest aspects of SOA is that it is oblivious to any of the platforms underneath that support it. That means even the oldest and most rigid mainframe systems can be re-energized (or modernized, as IBM likes to call it) to handle a new generation of applications and end-user demands.

As part of my ongoing work with Unisphere Research, I published a survey of SOA deployments and plans at mainframe sites, conducted in cooperation with SHARE, the IBM mainframe and large systems user group.

In our survey of 430 SHARE members (link to PDF download of executive summary), we found that many mainframe systems are at the center of efforts to extend applications into SOAs.

The SHARE survey found companies are still in the early stages of expanding the capacity of their current mainframe systems to support SOA. Close to one out of four respondents' companies have SOA efforts now in progress, and another one-third are planning or considering SOA. At least half of those engaged in or planning SOA say they are or will employ mainframes in a central role.There's still a lot of work that needs to be done, of course. Fewer than one out of ten could say that an appreciable amount of their SOA-based services are shared across two or more business units.

There are some great case studies out there on SOAs built on top of mainframes, and here's one story of Mainframe SOA in Action: According to an new report in SearchSOA, the Ohio Bureau of Worker's Compensation has moved its mainframe-based operations to a service-oriented architecture. Most new development occurs in .NET, but, as the report notes, " most of the data relating to more than $19 billion in assets is in mainframe IBM DB2 databases interacting with COBOL applications and using CICS."

BWC used the CA Gen tool to deliver more than 100 reusable mainframe services, consisting of CICS transactions.

Such data is consumed by the .NET applications that update the status of workers' compensation policies and claims for employers and workers accessing the information via standard Web browsers. Some large datasets will have to be eventually be moved off the mainframe environment, since CICS COBOL has 32k-data limits of how much data can be passed through the system, a challenge that was overcome by enabling applications to make multiple passes through the CICS servers.

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Almost half of respondents that have responded so far to a new ebizQ survey report they have SOA solutions already in place somewhere within their enterprises, but these efforts are scattered.

One out of four at this time report having more than five SOA projects going on across their organizations, and most say these are separate, unconnected efforts. For the most part, few touch mission-critical enterprise applications, though a majority of respondents expect to be interfacing with at least a few of such apps within the coming year.

These are preliminary, top-line results from ebizQ's current survey of SOA best practices, which is still open and awaiting your participation. Click here to complete the survey, if you have not already done so. All participants will be entered into a drawing for a $300 American Express Gift Card.

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As I noted in my recent series of posts on 2007 SOA success stories (here, here, here, and here) , this past year saw a multitude of positive stories emerging around SOA deployments. Here are some more highlights of companies that "got it" when it came to applying SOA principles in proactive places.

To speed up product roll-outs. Comcast Corporation turned to SOA techniques to integrate and wrapper literally thousands of back-end and legacy systems to provide new front-end services for the business. Comcast grew over the decades through acquisitions of local cable operators and media companies. As a result, the company has a large range of siloed applications and siloed product lines. Examples of new services launched include portals enabling wireless access for technicians, as well as a customer service portal -- both sharing and leveraging the same services. With tens of thousands of technicians on staff, just saving 15 minutes a day in productivity for each would save Comcast $100 million a year. The company’s 20,000 customer service technicians originally had to look through 10 or more applications to attempt to solve problems. Now, a unified call center and problem resolution portal not only helps its staff save time and money, but the same services are also now made available to technicians over their mobile phones as well as to customers. In addition, Comcast intends to cut turnaround times for new offerings from months to 24 hours, using SOA methods.

To unchain stovepiped systems. Albert Heijn (AH), a big retailer based in the Netherlands, lacked visibility into its supply chain, and was forced to rely on fixed replenishment schedules that were based on local demand forecasts. The company turned to a SOA-based approach to bridge its previously separated technology environments. Now, each of the chain's 720 stores connects to a central broker at AH's headquarters, which in turn connects to back-office applications. AH can now bridge previously separated application-to-application and B2B environments within a single infrastructure that also controls the supply chain. Information on each retail sale streams all the way back to suppliers. All point-of-sale data is automatically aggregated with sales data from across all stores and delivered to a centralized replenishment application. Decision makers now get replenished data every half hour to help with supply chain decisions.

To unchain supply chains. Emerson, a manufacturer, employed a service-oriented strategy that brought together the purchasing functions of 70 separate business units that purchase goods from 35,000 suppliers. Before the XML-EDI implementation, each unit communicated with its own suppliers. Now the suppliers see one organization. merson spent about $500,000 developing the hub, but reports it "has recovered those costs several times over." For example, putting 10 suppliers in the same shipping container cuts costs by 35%, and the company says it has saved millions in transport costs by consolidating shipping.

To increase retail operating efficiency. Kohls Department Store chain is employing SOA to help meet its goal of increasing profitability by five percent a year, primarily through operating efficiency. Over the past year, Marshall's department has been engaged in projects to enhance analytics and decision support, marketing and CRM, multi-channel systems, point of sale systems, and a warehouse management system. Plus, the company forged an agreement with Chase to manage its credit card business, which required closer integration with the bank's systems.

To keep from getting creamed. Daisy Brand, a leading domestic sour cream manufacturer, employed SOA to speed up the shipping processes for its highly perishable product. The company had a variety of systems and formats that tended to throw monkey wrenches into its distribution processes. Order changes, for example, span manual (fax, email, spreadsheets, etc.) and system functions (EDI, ETRP, third party freight, home-grown logistics and shipping applications), causing the process to slow and increasing spoilage costs. There were yawning gaps between systems, business processes and employee roles coupled with inevitable customer-driven changes were causing those processes to breakdown and impact the business. Implementing SOA-enabling tools, the company rebuilt its order change process to incorporate everything from a faxed order to customer EDI shipping acknowledgements to RFID product information. Daisy Brand generated a positive return on investment within six months and provided shared visibility into the order change process across groups and roles.

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SOA was going strong in 2007, and companies discovered a myriad of uses for this emerging methodology. For some companies, it was a way to avoid a costly ERP system upgrade, while for others, it was a way to achieve faster time to market. Here are some more world-class examples of how and where SOA made a difference over the past year:

As an end-run around a major ERP systems upgrade. Dow Corporation SOA-enabled its SAP R/2 system, making an upgrade to R/3 unnecessary. Dow's "Next Enterprise Architecture (NEA)" is based on SAP's Netweaver and MySAP. The SOA implementation will allow Dow to develop new systems while running existing SAP R/2 and in-house systems, which it plans to replace over the next 10 years. The first five applications Dow is developing as part of NEA will provide a highly integrated view of Dow's operations worldwide. In addition, managers and staff will gain easier access to the information they need, and systems development staff will be able to respond to their changing needs more quickly.

To automate manual processes. Safeco, an insurance company, launched an SOA initiative intended to support new product development and business process improvements. 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. Most of the time, there were manual processes associated with the MVR matching process, since records did not match online. The Safeco SOA team saw at least four major benefits coming out of their efforts, including legacy reuse, greater interoperability, more rapid turnaround (solution delivery within eight weeks), and very few lines of code required to accomplish integration. "The process implementation was done with less than 20 lines of code which were written for a special mapping capability," Safeco's SOA team reported.

To track the miles. Aeroplan, originally the frequent-flier plan for Air Canada, used SOA to expand its reach to both consumers and business partners in supporting customer loyalty rewards programs. Aeroplan's mainframe-based systems were originally built around supporting frequent-flier miles, until Air Canada spun the company off two years ago. Aeroplan's challenge was to expand its Its range of offerings beyond what was a limited number of flights on Air Canada routes. Enter Web services, which helped Aeroplan integrate with partners to expand its program beyond airline seats, while still leveraging its mainframe as a back-end transaction engine, but add service layers for interacting with business partners and consumers.

To run a regional government more efficiently. The Ontario provincial government has been running an SOA-based infrastructure for close to a decade, calling it their "common components" approach. 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. 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. 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.

To untangle spaghetti architecture. Brokerage giant Morgan Stanley employed SOA techniques to fix its internal IT mess. The firm had a lot of the usual issues hold back many organizations -- stovepiped systems, branch offices that wouldn't, or couldn't, communicate or share files, and a corporate culture in which developers were accustomed to doing everything themselves. The company turned to an SOA approach to better reuse IT assets and to provide more and better performance data, made available through dashboards and portals, so it could better track the profitability of individual branches and product lines.

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In keeping with the theme of this blog, here are some more examples of areas where SOA has been put to work over the past year, mainly gathered from my blog posts over at ZDNet:

To run the world's largest particle accelerator. Event-driven SOA is now being employed for the monitoring controls at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). Interestingly, the project is powered by Java-based technologies, not Web services. The SOA-based system takes readings from 30,000 gauges and publishes them to an enterprise service bus. Technicians at workstations and PC browsers — as well as autonomic systems and auditing databases–subscribe to the service readings.

To tie together customer service data for faster problem resolution. Comcast has been employing SOA methodologies to better connect customer service activities, and thus avoid such gaps in analyzing network problems. With tens of thousands of technicians on staff, just saving 15 minutes a day in productivity for each could save Comcast $100 million a year. The company’s 20,000 customer service technicians originally had to look through 10 or more applications to attempt to solve problems. Now, a unified call center and problem resolution portal not only helps its staff save time and money, but the same services are also now made available to technicians over their mobile phones as well as to
customers. The portal includes information about service across neighborhoods.

To facilitate master data management. Pfizer used SOA to bring together data assets from across its global enterprise into a single, centralized data definition. For example, the company had four to five definitions of what ‘customer’ meant. Pfizer turned to SOA to decouple its data from its applications, such as SAP, Oracle, and WebLogic. SOA was employed as the mechanism through which you begin distributing data. The team generated a standard set of interfaces for accessing its MDM tool and deployed it into its SOA architecture.

To better integrate disparate vendor products. Intel turned to SOA to reduce the amount of resources being put into point-to-point types of integration between various enterprise packages. The company was spending an inordinate amount of development capacity in both developing and then sustaining those integrations as vendors would change their products. Intel reports that it has seen a return on investment “in excess of tens of millions of dollars” as a result of its three-year-old SOA effort.

To improve customer service and more accurately project dividends in the gaming industry. And, finally, with thanks to Lorraine Lawson over at IT Business Edge, we have an example that specifies the gaming industry, but I think the intelligent, real-time customer relationship management described is no gamble. Such information, made available across the enterprise, can greatly raise the stakes on competitiveness in all industries. Harrah’s employed SOA to learn more about its customers across all its properties, which include several prominent resorts and casinos. Workers can now easily identify and reward regular customers across the company’s numerous holdings. SOA also made it easier for Harrah’s to acquire and integrate new companies.

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Thanks to a combination of SOA techniques, Ajax code, and open source technology, listeners in the Chicago area now have access to a YouTube-ish meets MySpace-ish service in which they can view program snippets or new music.

As reported by Rich Seeley in SearchSOA, Chicago Public Radio's Vocalo.org Website, open since the fall, extends the station's presence in the market by offering listeners an online, collaborative experience. Typical programs, which run from three to six minutes, feature interviews with people on the street, music from local artists, discussions of rapid transit, improvisational radio comedy, and high school students talking about gang violence in their neighborhoods.

It's all local user-generated or user-uploaded audio content -- no syndicated or content from other broadcast sources.

Audio content is managed using Drupal, a free and open source modular content management system (CMS) written in PHP.

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