This morning at the SOA Consortium meeting in Orlando, Richard Soley announced the winners of the CIO Magazine | SOA Consortium case study contest. Our goal was to highlight business success stories and lessons learned to provide proof points and insights for other organizations considering or pursuing SOA adoption. To qualify for the contest, the SOA project must have been completed with demonstrated business results.
There was one overall winner, and five industry recognition winners. Without further ado...
Overall Winner: Synovus Financial
Financial services company Synovus provides commercial and retail banking, as well as investment services, to 35 banks throughout the southeast U.S. Synovus partnered with two other organizations to deliver a new Secure Value Payment (SVP) Program using SOA techniques. Cross-industry collaboration and early cooperation between business and IT led to a million-dollar cost savings to bring the project in on budget. The program has been successfully rolled out to 37 financial institutions with more on the way.
Special Recognition in Insurance: Penn National Insurance
Penn National Insurance is a regional property and casualty insurance carrier. Penn National responded to increased competition and dissatisfied independent insurance agents by implementing predictive analytics to enhance pricing precision, and by replacing existing systems to streamline processing. Within two months of rollout to independent agents in Maryland, the company saw a 65% increase in new business quotes from those agents.
Special Recognition in Transportation: Con-way, Inc - SOA and EDA Evolution
Con-way is a $4.7 billion freight transportation and logistics services company. Con-way wanted to transform their business applications, moving from rigid and siloed legacy systems to a highly flexible and agile event-driven Service-Oriented architecture. Some business benefits of their new SOA-based systems include the ability to deliver projects to the business 3-4 times faster than with the previous system, greatly reduced time at border crossings for their fleet, automation of processes has saved 500 man-hours daily, while Sales and Finance personnel now have real-time decision support.
Special Recognition in Government: US Department of Defense, AT&L
The US Department of Defense (DoD) Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics (AT&L) organization has responsibility for management and oversight of Major Defense Acquisition Programs (MDAPs). AT&L needed to achieve timely access to accurate, authoritative, and reliable information supporting acquisition oversight, accountability, and decision making throughout DoD. They especially needed to eliminate poor information visibility, and manual report creation. The SOA infrastructure and related governance processes enabled authoritative, information-supporting, acquisition decision making on $103B in total program value.
Special Recognition in Technology: SunGard Financial Systems
SunGard Financial Systems delivers software and processing solutions to the Financial Services industry. The goal with SunGard’s SOA project (called Common Services Architecture or CSA) was to expose components and business process logic and make it easier to consume them. CSA allows SunGard business segments to catalog their software assets, produce reusable components and consume them in composite solutions. CSA establishes standards and fosters reuse through the sharing of design principles across products, and sharing of utilities and business services. They have achieved a higher volume of solutions delivered, greater efficiencies of delivering solutions and compatibility to integrate with their customers’ SOA environment, resulting in higher business satisfaction.
Special Recognition in Healthcare: Canada Health Infoway
The Canada Health Infoway’s (Infoway) mandate was to develop an architecture to support an Interoperable Electronic Health Record (iEHR). This record is designed to facilitate the sharing of data across the continuum of care, across health care delivery organizations and across geographies. The architecture was developed with a few key principles in mind from agility to support the evolving nature of healthcare delivery, to hard financial benefits. The architecture has been adopted by all of the jurisdictions in Canada. An independent study of the cost/benefits of the HIAL and iEHR was done for Infoway by Booz Allen Hamilton. They estimated total cost of IT enabling the healthcare system to be $9.9B. The annual benefits (savings or cost avoidance in healthcare services) are estimated at $6.1B and to be $82.4B over 20 years.
Over the course of the next several weeks, both CIO Magazine and the SOA Consortium will publish details of the winning entries. In addition, we will share insights from the vast pool of submissions.
Congratulations to the winners and many thanks to all who participated. As a contest judge, I can say without equivocation that business-driven SOA is alive and well.
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