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Thomas, Railinc Realize Benefits
Companies that have created SOA centers have seen positive results.
Thomson Financial, which is now known as Thomson Reuters Markets following the April merger between parent company Thomson Corp. and Reuters, set up a COE that is responsible for creating technology strategy, setting standards and guidelines for SOA, governing projects handled by individual groups within the company, and developing metrics to measure success, says Ian Koenig, who has served as senior vice president and chief architect of the New York-based provider of information and technology for the financial community.
The COE has enabled Thomson to deploy SOA for its Thomson One Web product line, a family of browser-based products serving the financial markets. "The principles of SOA were used to cleanly delineate the various building blocks of the product family and build these in a manner such that they could be reused across all products in the family," Koenig says. "This was done through a governance process owned and managed by the COE.
"We wanted an overarching framework that identifies services, so we don't have to duplicate things too much," Koenig says.
One of the key achievements of the COE was that it enabled Thomson to identification and build at least 50 services that support data centers, connectivity, storage and backup, document searching, order management, customer contracts management, billing and reporting. By coordinating the creation of services in the COE, "we eliminated the competing and duplicative functionality from the adjacent services, so that there was a clear home for each item of functionality/content," Koenig says.
Thomson has seen multiple benefits from having a COE, Koenig says. One of the biggest is that developers can all be on the same page with regard to architecture, rather than going off in different directions. Also, successful SOA implementations can be repeated throughout the organization because of the accumulated knowledge and experience.
"We've adopted best practices and are providing thought leadership and guidance to the entire technology organization with a very small team," Koenig says. There are currently fewer than 10 full-time people on the center of excellence team, all enterprise architects.
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Another company, Railinc, a subsidiary of the American Association of Railroads, also has established a SOA center of excellence. The COE gives Railinc, which provides information services such as the status of railroad equipment and train location to the rail industry, in-house expertise on different aspects of SOA.
The center "has been essential for us to get our SOA going," says vice president and CIO Todd Bolon. "Although none of its members are full time, it has provided a central focus and ownership that has been vital to our early successes."
Benefits Railinc has seen from SOA include a cost savings of some $150,000 in development costs through more efficient application development, says Bolon. For instance, savings have resulted from the reuse of services that were built once and used multiple times by applications within Railinc, among them a service that provides information on Standard Transportation Commodity Codes, and another for Roadmarks, the identifying codes associated with railroads. It also reused a service related to recording repairs on rail equipment being watched for potential maintenance issues.
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Railinc expects savings to grow. Other benefits of SOA include increased responsiveness to market change and faster development of new applications, Bolon says.
The move to SOA has also brought challenges. For example, getting the development teams to buy into the potential benefits of SOA wasn't always easy because developers perceived that building services to be reused by other projects might add to their development workload and they were not clear on what the benefits would be, Bolon says. "We have started to overcome this with grass roots efforts with the project teams," he says. "We have an architectural community where information flows bi-directionally to and from the enterprise architecture team through the application architects that work on the project teams to the developers." The company uses this structure to get the application architects and then the developers excited about reuse.
"We also began tracking the financial benefits and publicizing them after agreeing on a model for calculating costs and savings associated with reuse," Bolon says.
Another challenge, he says, is that there are multiple services emerging with overlapping functionality, "so it is difficult to determine when it is worth the overhead of making a larger, more complex service that can address diverse needs vs. smaller, more targeted services that address a more narrow set of needs."
Still, says Bolton, "I expect the [center] to work out issues and speed adoption as we progress through various phases of maturity with SOA."
Also see:
Average Spending on SOA Reached $1.4 million in 2007
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