SOA Consortium Insights

Ashok Kumar of Avis Budget and the SOA-C answers "SOA's 6 Burning Questions"

Ashok Kumar, Architect and IT Director at Avis Budget Group and SOA Consortium Co-Chair, answers SOA's 6 Burning Questions in a recent JavaWorld article.  In the article, Ashok shares his perspective on SOA skills, solution performance, security, and generating business value: 

"1. Is anyone saving (or making money) using SOA?

Ashok Kumar of Avis Budget Group says he is. Avis began using SOA about two years ago in portions of the company to open new channels with travel partners. “They can now do direct business with us without having to go through a middleman. So it’s saved them a couple bucks, saved us a couple of bucks,” says Kumar, who is based in New Jersey and is director of services architecture information technology. “The cost of bringing on new partners is down to nothing now because of SOA.”

Avis Budget can now bring on a new partner in a day instead of a month, he says, because with SOA it is just a matter of configuring a service rather than making large application changes. “When we started that the cost of bringing on a new partner was anywhere from $40,000 to $50,000, now it’s down to $3,000 or $4,000,” he says."

According to the article, Avis Budget's success is in the "real money" category:

"There are two kinds of payback with SOA, says Mike West of Saugatuck Technology. The first comes when IT can reduce the amount of money it spends providing services. West believes SOA adoption is still in its early stages, and that perhaps only 10% to 15% of businesses are using SOA and doing it in such a way to save money.

An even smaller percentage of companies are using SOA in such a way that they are improving earnings, he says.

The world is full of projects that can be done quickly and cheaply and offer no long-term benefit, West notes. SOA is a radically different approach to building and managing systems that create a foundation for rapid change, he says.

“The real money gets saved or gets made when you have this flexible business foundation so your business can be more profitable on a top-line basis – not just IT savings being subtracted so the top line is smaller,” West says."

Emphasis is mine.  Check out the full article.

SWIFT Dialogue Magazine Roundtable on SOA

Everyone in the banking community knows SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication.  SWIFT is responsible for transferring money (and other electronic value) all over the world, and counts dollars in the trillions.  Some 8,000 members, mostly (but not entirely) banking institutions are members of SWIFT, as well as users of the organization's worldwide network.  As such, SWIFT participates in various OMG activities, most notably OMG's financial services work.

Likely due to that link, I was invited to participate in a Roundtable discussion about SOA adoption entitled, "SOA: Living Up to the Hype?"  The article has just been published in SWIFT's quarterly Dialogue magazine, the "voice of the SWIFT community."  Besides myself, participants included Oliver Kling of SOA Consortium Founding Sponsor SAP; Abhijit Gupta of SOA Consortium Participant Deutsche Bank; and Frank vanDamme of SWIFT itself.

While the discussion included a share of technology issues (for example, about semantic representations), I was delighted to see most contributions focus on business benefits of SOA, and getting past the hype about "silver bullets" in the market.  Gupta focused on the transformation that Deutsche Bank has been through (and continues), while vanDamme stressed agreements & standards.

Unfortunately the article isn't available in a simple web page, but the entire issue of Dialogue can be downloaded in Adobe PDF format here; and the article itself begins on page 52.

SOA Consortium at BPM Think Tank

This week, I'm representing the SOA Consortium at BPM Think Tank.  Why an SOA advocacy group at a BPM event?  Simple.  During our first Executive Summit series in February, leading CIOs and CTOs implored us to help "break the artificial divide between SOA and BPM".  From their point of view, SOA and BPM are complements:

“SOA, BPM, Lean, Six Sigma are all basically one thing (business strategy and structure) that must work side by side”. – CTO during SOA Executive Summit

An excerpt from our Executive Summit whitepaper expands on this statement:

The CIO and CTO participants think about SOA from a top-down business view. That view starts with business processes, expands into business activities, associates those activities to the balance sheet, and then considers the required business services to accomplish those activities. These business services are not at the discrete technical implementation level. Rather, the business services refer to services provided by humans, or machines.

Essentially, these executives see SOA as the means to “execute the business model”. For this to transpire, the methods to define and record this executable business model, and the supporting technology must be seamless. In the minds of IT executives, SOA and BPM related products are used in concert to accomplish one goal, despite the discrete technology industry packaging.

The SOA Consortium shares this view.  SOA and BPM are complementary strategies.  Each delivers business value on its own.  But, used together, the business value amplifies.

While I'm here, I'll be participating on a SOA and BPM panel, and I'll be engaging in conversations with BPM community leaders on how we can collaborate to "break the artificial divide between SOA and BPM".

If you are using SOA and BPM together and would like to share your insights and/or stories, feel free to leave a comment, or send me an email: brenda at soa-consortium.org

Wall Street Journal: SOA Stirs a Computing Buzz

Today's Inside Tech section of the WSJ online  features an article on SOA by  Christopher Lawton.  Why is this significant?  Because the WSJ's readers are business and information technology executives.  For SOA to reach its full potential, it needs to be understood and championed by the executive suite.  By understood, I don't mean in technical terms.  I'm referring to business terms.  Such as the underlying concept of business services that represent real-world business activities.  And, the composition of those business services into processes and interactions that actually match the intent of business strategists and operations owners.  And of course, the business benefits such as agility and time to value.

I found the article very business-friendly, with an easy to consume explanation:

In essence, SOA allows business processes -- like verifying a customer's address or checking credit ratings -- to be built using modular chunks of software called "services" that can communicate with each other and be used across different parts of a business.

It includes four success stories -- Austin Energy, Thomson Financial, Ameriprise Financial Services and Minnesota's Anoka-Hennepin School District.  While all are interesting, the Thomson Financial example spoke to a variety of important concepts - business collaboration, quality, change and time to value:

Vladimir Mitevski, vice president of product management, core services, for Thomson Financial, says it once took six weeks and roughly 20 people to build, deploy and maintain service offerings for Thomson One, a software platform for the financial industry. After adopting a service-oriented architecture, in part using software from Hewlett-Packard Co., Mr. Mitevski says a single programmer working with various businesses, quality testing and support groups within the company can deploy new and updated offerings in as little as 15 minutes. He cites "speed to market" as his No. 1 reason for adopting the methodology.

Check out the full article, and forward it on to your business and IT executives.

ACT/IAC Enterprise Architecture SIG Meeting - Member Guest Post from Dr. Burc Oral

Dr. Burc Oral, one of our SOA Consortium members, shares insights yet again, this time from the Enterprise Architecture SIG meeting of ACT/IAC.

On June 20th, I attended the Enterprise Architecture SIG meeting in Falls Church, VA organized by ACT/IAC.

The meeting agenda comprised of a talk by Dr. Carolyn Strano and short presentations on status of sub working groups/projects. Among many projects this SIG has, I focused on the Shared Services and SOA Guidance Project and MDA. Others are

• ERP and Integration
• Collaboration
• Data Architecture
• Model Driven Architecture
• Chief Architects Forum, ArchitecturePlus, Government support.

Dr. Strano talked about the Role of Enterprise Architect in the Federal Government. This topic is closely related to the efforts of the Enterprise Architecture 2010 Working Group at the SOA Consortium. As a part of the Ground Floor SOA, we have been closely working on this subject and the research provided by Dr. Strano is very valuable. I will be sharing the presentation with the consortium members.

Here are my notes.

Dr. Strano interviewed several architects at the federal government, reviewed position and vacancy descriptions, and researched the activities of the architects at the US executive branch. Using the grounded theory process, she analyzed her findings about the role of the enterprise architects. Her talk covered

• Functional roles of an enterprise architect
• Value of an enterprise architect
• Benefits of an enterprise architect
• Competencies of an enterprise architect
• Organizational positioning of an enterprise architect
• Functional interfaces of an enterprise architect
• Dependency factors for an enterprise architect

Dr. Strano’s concludes that an enterprise architect has a multi-dimensional role in which s/he has to provide a “maestro view” of the enterprise and translate strategy into actionable plans towards a shared vision.

Dave Mayo briefed on the activities of the SOA and shared services guidance. IT turnes out that their document is prepared for the Federal CIO council. Earlier outline was asked to be reworked as well as the people working on it. They are now working on

• Rationale
• Business benefits
• SOA/SOI/SOE design and concept
• Target architecture
• Keys for Implementation
• Roadmap and maturity Model

September/October is the timeframe for the CIO council and OMB review.