Build SOA Center Of Excellence, Say Experts

More organizations are migrating to a service-oriented architecture to reduce the time and cost it takes to develop new applications and revise existing ones.

Gartner last year estimated that a service-oriented architecture (SOA) would be used in more than 50% of new critical operational applications and business processes—and in more than 80% by 2010. The research firm says SOA "has dramatically grown in popularity, and adoption has expanded across vertical industries, geographies and organization sizes."

But moving to SOA can represent a major shift for IT organizations. For example, it significantly changes the way enterprises create new applications.

So experts recommend that CIOs create a SOA "center of excellence" (COE) to concentrate knowledge and promote best practices. And for good reason. Companies, such as Thomson Financial and Railinc, a unit of the American Association of Railroads, that have set up COEs have benefited significantly.

SOA is a way to design software for distributed computing environments that involves the use of independent services, or activities that provide a certain business function, to support the needs of a business. Not only are these services used to exchange information and support business processes, but they can also be reused by other applications.

Among the leading IT vendors offering SOA technologies are IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.

Given that SOA implementations can have a huge impact on IT and the organization as a whole, experts advise setting up some sort of governance and best practices effort to help ensure a successful migration. For many, part of that effort will include creating a COE to gather information about SOA implementations and to leverage best practices within the organization.

A COE is typically charged with helping an organization or individual departments select standards and SOA products from vendors. It also helps plan and develop new SOA initiatives, trains and educates people about services and the use of SOA-based technology, and promotes a service-oriented architecture within the enterprise.

"Anytime you start something new that is going to affect a large group of people, a center of excellence almost always makes sense-at least in the initial stages-so you can concentrate the learning," says Ian Finley, research director at AMR Research, an information technology research firm and consultancy. "As you learn things, that knowledge gets concentrated and you don't have to relearn it."

It's helpful for organizations launching a broad SOA initiative to have a COE "because SOA is both a business and technology strategy," says Judith Hurwitz, president and CEO of Hurwitz & Associates, another prominent consulting and research firm. "It requires that organizations bring people together who have knowledge of how the business works and what processes need to be automated as well as how the business is going to change as the organization rethinks its technology strategy."

She notes that companies typically start SOA with pilots in various business units. However, "it is important to leverage learnings and lessons across the organization," she says. "There needs to be a team that can take their experience and bring it to play throughout the organization."

The center of excellence can act as the governance body for an SOA implementation, overseeing what goes into a new architecture that the organization is creating and ensuring that the architecture will meet the current and future needs of the organization, Finley says. "It's a shift from being project oriented to building out an architecture with long-term assets that are going to be used in future projects," he says. "That requires a central group."

Mostly senior architects with experience in SOA, who are also familiar with the business and operational issues of the organization, Finley says. He adds that the center ideally should come out of the IT department.

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.

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.

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."

	1. 05-08-2008 13:26
	Great article with good examples. I have built a CoE focused on the advancement of applied SOA strategies and in the long run find that our organization was able to take this area of our industry to a real world applied working state. We were able to get past the marketing and industry hype to real solutions. The investment up front refined our focus considerably and demonstrated improved quality to the business functions. Guest

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	2. 06-04-2009 09:27
	Cameron, it is good to hear a success story implementing SOA strategies. In my experience, I've had many difficult situations ensuring a real solution. Perhaps we didn't invest enough on the front end as you've suggested? Registered

John Sane