SOA Consortium Insights

CIO Magazine | SOA Consortium Case Study Contest - Special Recognition Winner Snapshot: US DoD AT&L

The US Department of Defense's Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics (AT&L) organization won special recognition in Government in our SOA Case Study contest.  Here is a snapshot of their story, created by excerpting the contest submission.  The groupings and emphasis are mine.

Organization Background

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).

Business Scenario

Poor information visibility, manual report creation: Currently, DoD generally limits the collection, correlation, and dissemination of acquisition information to mandated reporting and specifically formatted products, such as the Selected Acquisition Reports (SARs) submitted annually to Congress or the Defense Acquisition Executive Summary (DAES) Reports. Oversight requirements from Congress and OSD are met primarily through manual data collection and the import of electronic data from the Services.

Acquisition program and status reporting processes for the Department are resource intensive, lack timeliness, and frequently are not authoritative. These limitations create an environment where the norm is reactive responses to existing problems versus proactive management to mitigate potential problems.

Improve decision-making: To address these issues and to provide effective and efficient delivery of warfighter capabilities, AT&L needed to achieve timely access to accurate, authoritative, and reliable information supporting acquisition oversight, accountability, and decision making throughout DoD. DoD leadership initiated a number of data and information sharing activities to address the information management gaps. One of these was SOA, as stated in 2007 AT&L Strategic Implementation Plan Goals.

Prior to SOA, data systems within DoD were implemented to electronically mimic pre-existing paper-based systems. They are better in that regard, but they are not noticeably different in type. SOA is reaching for a profoundly different data model: one in which data are simply, transparently available throughout the enterprise to whomever has a legitimate need for the data as soon as the data are developed.

ROI

Mission agility: To further prove the flexibility of this new data management model, the Air Force changed one of their authoritative data elements at the program management source for the B2-EHF program; business tool displays were refreshed, and the revised program data element was properly reflected in each display—available for use by the Department in less than a minute.

Better decision-making: The SOA infrastructure and related governance processes enabled authoritative information supporting acquisition decision making on $103B in total program value to be pulled from authoritative sources, as needed. With the existing processes, obtaining this same information may take several months, and the data may no longer be current when it is needed for decision making.

Project Organization

Center of Excellence. Governance Team.

Cross-service collaboration: The technical team was made up of technical resources from three sources: data providers (from Army, Air Force, Navy, and the Defense Acquisition Management Information Retrieval program office), the hosting partner (BTA), and software technologists.

Lessons

Data Governance Team: The governance established for the demonstration included leadership representing the functional interests and the technical interests of the effort, along with support from data source and SOA service consumer representatives. Mission: This governance body agreed to data definitions, identified authoritative sources for the data, and achieved data availability for on-demand access. Management: Centralized management is required for ongoing coordination of business processes and information requirements to avoid duplicate efforts and costs while encouraging reuse of services.

Security complications: Significant delays and challenges resulted from differing security standards among organizations, and initial lack of understanding of the maturity and configuration of data providers. Thorough analysis of security policies and practices and careful design are required for the next phase, which will include identity management, access management, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), and the usage of Computer Access Cards (CACs).

CIO Magazine | SOA Consortium Case Study Contest - Special Recognition Winner Snapshot: SunGard

SunGard won special recognition in Technology in our SOA Case Study contest.  Here is a snapshot of their story, created by excerpting the contest submission.  The groupings and emphasis are mine.

Company Background

SunGard Financial Systems delivers software and processing solutions to the Financial Services industry.

Business Scenario

Product transformation for agility: SunGard Financial Systems delivers software and processing solutions to the Financial Services industry through hundreds of products, many obtained through acquisition. These products have been built on disparate operating systems making integration very lengthy and difficult. These are the same challenges that their customers face with inflexible technology and business silos. SunGard is organized around different units, which serve unique business areas, such as investment management or brokerage and clearing. These units are known as business segments.

Customer Drivers: Many of their customers had embarked on SOA architectures themselves and wanted to find a trusted partner whose efforts complemented those initiatives. They also said they wanted to reduce the number of vendors they deal with and thus were looking to leverage more of what SunGard could offer.

SOA-ify Products: The goal with the SOA project (called Common Services Architecture or CSA) was to expose more components and business process logic and make it easier to consume them. CSA allows SunGard 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. The CSA is an evolution in the way that they develop new products and services.

The SOA project is addressing both the SunGard business problem of creating agility from siloed applications and the customers’ business problem of needing to change how the software mapped to their evolving business processes.

ROI

ROI is beginning to be recognized by the business with continued progress expected through this year and well into 2009 and beyond. The basic metrics of the ROI include:

1. Higher volume of solutions delivered, including greater exposure to previously hidden assets

2. Greater efficiencies of delivering solutions

3. Compatibility to integrate with customers’ SOA environment, resulting in higher business satisfaction.

Project Organization

SOA COE: The Infinity team manages the SOA Center of Excellence, which has a quality assurance team and certification and performance lab. They also provide centralized management of federated development communities across the global organization and the registration of assets and project management cataloging the decomposition of key products into agile components. Common architects represent each of the business segments and they review and vote on submissions to the SOA from various workgroups. Collaboration is fostered by community calls and active wikis to leverage each other’s work in real time.

Customer Advisory Board: To ensure that the project remains on track, they instituted a customer advisory board, whose membership is composed of enterprise architects and technology officers from top tier banking, investment services, energy and insurance organizations.

Lessons

They have learned through experience in the Infinity project that agility is realized far before significant reuse, (which does come but it requires a critical mass of component content before reuse becomes meaningful).

They also reaffirmed the importance that senior executive sponsorship has to an SOA initiative.

They gained an appreciation for some other key characteristics required for an SOA project of any size, including:

1. Keeping the objectives and scope at each stage clear, tracked, measured and reported.
2. Ensuring the teams are organized, with clear roles and responsibilities defined.
3. Project discipline such that the SOA initiative maintains clear milestones, project plans, risks, issues, resource allocation, and progress reporting.
4. They’re still learning the lessons of the importance of communication at all levels, ensuring frequent, accurate and consistent information is exposed to the right people.
5. Don’t try to boil the ocean – begin with a pilot project that will show immediate business benefit.

SOA & BPM: The interdependency between SOA and BPM has also become very clear to them. To achieve the benefits of BPM you need to provide the right level of services – to achieve business-focused SOA, BPM enables the identification and prioritization of which services should be built.

CIO Magazine | SOA Consortium Case Study Contest - Special Recognition Winner Snapshot: Penn National

Penn National won special recognition in Insurance in our SOA Case Study contest.  Here is a snapshot of their story, created by excerpting the contest submission.  The groupings and emphasis are mine.

Company Background

Penn National Insurance is a regional property and casualty insurance carrier based in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Penn National Insurance writes approximately $550 million of annual premiums in personal and commercial lines of business combined.

Business Scenario

Losing market share, independent agent dissatisfaction: Over the past few years, the company has been losing market share in its personal lines of business due to competitor pricing strategies and dissatisfaction with existing systems among the independent agents that market the company’s products. At the same time, the company’s costs associated with processing new and renewal business in this market sector have consistently exceeded those of competitors.

Strategic business initiative: In 2006, Penn National Insurance made a strategic decision to commit corporate resources to reinvigorate its personal lines of business. Key elements of the plan included the implementation of predictive analytics to enhance pricing precision, and the replacement of existing systems to streamline processing and make it easier for agents to place business with Penn National Insurance.

To summarize, the company needed a new system, which enabled:

• Quality growth and market retention through increased pricing precision
• Expense reduction through lower processing costs
• Agency acceptance through ease of doing business
• Flexibility for adding new products, entering new markets, and providing a platform to absorb additional business in the event of an acquisition
• Increased data accessibility
• Faster time-to-market for new products
• Faster turn-around time for system changes

ROI

Pricing Precision: The primary objective of the project was to achieve better pricing precision. Less than twelve months after the project kick-off, a scorecard had been coded as a service and integrated with legacy systems. This allowed the company to move from a simplistic system that assigned new business among just three tiers, to a much more sophisticated system that evaluated numerous risk characteristics and then assigned the business to one of 25 new tiers, increasing pricing segmentation and pricing precision dramatically.

Increase agency acceptance: The second business objective identified was to increase agency acceptance of Penn National Insurance systems. The new system was available to Maryland agents in mid-April, 2008. During the first two months following implementation, the company saw a 65% increase in new business quotes from those same agents over the same time period for the previous year. Feedback from agents indicated that they were “extremely satisfied” with the new system, comparing it favorably to the systems of much larger national carriers.

Policy Processing Efficiency: The third business objective to be achieved by the project was expense reduction associated with policy processing. Using legacy systems, the company’s STP rate for policies processed without human intervention, stood at 18%. At three months post-implementation, the company is already experiencing an STP rate of 75%, where the new system has been deployed. When fully implemented for all states and all lines of business, the company expects to save $1.3 million annually in FTE processing costs.

Additional Cost Savings: Additional annual expense savings of $1.2 million are expected from using defined business rules that apply more discipline in the automatic ordering of third-party reports when compared to the previous process of manually ordering these same reports.

Further, the company anticipates an annual expense savings, in vendor maintenance costs and FTE development/testing time, of over $800,000, by eliminating the need to support two rating systems.

Overall, the company expects to achieve tangible annual cost savings of $3.3 million from the new system

Project Organization

Business & IT Collaboration: Business and IT project team members collaborated daily to define functionality details for specific modules targeted for reuse. (service design)

Another forum for collaboration existed in the company’s Data Stewardship Council (DSC). Comprised of decision makers from the Underwriting, Claims, Marketing, Finance, Actuarial, and IT Departments, the DSCs mission is corporate data governance.

Lessons

Business buy-in upfront: Time spent up-front gaining business support for the SOA project will be rewarded. There were many times on the project when they had to ask their business clients to think or work differently than they were accustomed to doing. Because their clients already understood the benefits of SOA, they readily accepted these new challenges.

Disciplined architectural governance and communication processes are essential to the success of a SOA project.

CIO Magazine | SOA Consortium Case Study Contest - Special Recognition Winner Snapshot: Con-Way

Con-way Inc. won special recognition in Transportation in our SOA Case Study contest.  Here is a snapshot of their story, created by excerpting the contest submission.  The groupings and emphasis are mine.

Company Background

Con-way, a $4.7 billion freight transportation and logistics services company based in San Mateo, Calif.

Business Scenario

IT-based Business transformation: Recognizing the need for more adaptable and responsive product offerings, Con-way embarked on a journey of business application transformation, moving from rigid and siloed legacy systems to a highly flexible and agile event-driven Service Oriented Architecture.

Transportation Industry challenges: In the face of explosive globalization, rising fuel costs, increased security regulations and extensive government reporting requirements, the transportation and logistics industry is going through dramatic change. Some industry segments are facing the risk of commoditization and consolidation. At the same time, existing customers expect more for less from their transportation and logistics providers.

IT legacy systems & infrastructure impeded business change as follows:

• Respond to continual competitive pressure to differentiate in an industry marked by rapid expansion, consolidation and commoditization.
• Deliver new services, as well as adapt existing services quickly, as new business opportunities present themselves.
• Address increasing and changing customer demands, by participating in a real-time extended enterprise with customers, their trading partners, carriers and other logistics providers in order to provide them with better control of and visibility into their global supply chains.
• Eliminate latency in the flow of information as freight operations and customers require near real-time knowledge of the current state of affairs.
• Deliver IT solutions faster to support the business. Traditional IT solutions architectures could not quickly adapt to changes in the business processes or flow of information.
• Eliminate siloed business functionality requiring inefficient dual entry into multiple systems; with the goal of capturing information once to ensure it gets to other business functions and data stores that require it when it is needed.
• Overcome inertia in the adoption of enabling technologies. Older IT architectures could not support rapid adoption of existing and emerging technologies such as wireless handheld devices, warehouse automation and RFID.

ROI

Application Portfolio benefits: Con-way has approached SOA holistically, believing that the real benefits are derived only when the approach is applied consistently across the application portfolio. So, this case study reflects not just the results of one project in isolation, but how early efforts have over time yielded a high degree of reuse, cost-savings and accelerated delivery of systems. Projects are now being delivered 3-4 times faster.

Business Benefit examples:

Reduced time at Canadian border: For example, all interactions with Canadian and U.S. Customs by Con-way were previously manual and paper-based. Truck drivers frequently encountered delays in crossing the border as a result. By sending Canadian Customs Conveyance reports and U.S. Customs Manifests and Conveyance containing information about the tractors and trailers in an event-driven manner, Con-way trucks crossing to and from Canada are often pre-cleared. This enabled Con-way to reduce the time required for border crossings from two to three hours to less than a minute.

Automation creates man-hour reduction: There are between 6,500 and 10,000 appointment shipments processed by Con-way per day. These were being handled manually in Con-way’s system, resulting in redundant data entry. Each entry took up to two to three minutes. By automating the business process and triggering it through an event, Con-way has saved up to 500 man-hours daily.

Business Agility: Operations, Sales and Finance personnel also have real-time decision support by removing the latency in the flow of mission critical data. Millions of business events are being published and processed in an event-driven manner.

Finally, an agile architecture has been enabled, facilitating change both in the business and technical arenas, including integration hooks for advanced dock simulation, dock automation, handheld devices, emerging technologies and e-Business processes.

Project Organization

Business-IT Collaboration: As part of Con-way Freight’s project governance, business cases are developed with business sponsors before any major project is undertaken. During the execution of a project, there are usually several business users involved in various parts of the software development lifecycle including use case analysis, user interface design and user acceptance. As agile software development practices are being adopted, business users will become even more closely integrated with the emergence of new applications and functionality.

Lessons

Get senior executive sponsorship from the outset. Con-way set out the prove the concept with its first SOA project and made sure that executive management understood this was going to be the first step in a systematic, broader effort. This has been critical to the company’s success with the event-driven SOA effort. ROI can be difficult to assess at the outset, which is why an executive sponsor, like the CIO, really needs to be on board to sell it to the business. Further, the executive support needs to be intrepid and stay the course as the company goes through finding the right groove to move forward.

Approach the SOA program from a holistic perspective. Partition business functionality into services whether there is anticipated reuse or not. Do not over engineer or try to build for unknown requirements, but build in an extensible manner.

CIO Magazine | SOA Consortium Case Study Contest - Special Recognition Winner Snapshot: Canada Health Infoway

Canada Health Infoway won special recognition in Healthcare in our SOA Case Study contest.  Here is a snapshot of their story, created by excerpting the contest submission.  The groupings and emphasis are mine.

Organization

Canada Health Infoway is an independent, not-for-profit organization funded by the federal government that jointly invests with every province and territory to accelerate the development and adoption of electronic health record projects in Canada.

Business Scenario

Nationwide Electronic Health Records: The Canada Health Infoway’s (Infoway) mandate was to develop an architecture to support an Interoperable Electronic Health Record (iEHR). They define it as: “The iEHR provides each individual in Canada with a secure and private lifetime record of their key health history and care within the health system. The record is available electronically to authorized health providers and the individual anywhere, anytime in support of high quality care. This record is designed to facilitate the sharing of data across the continuum of care, across health care delivery organizations and across geographies.”

The iEHR is designed to be a reliable, authoritative, private, secure, and highly available set of databases of clinical information that is sourced from the clinical point of service.

Scope: They estimated that once the Canadian healthcare system is fully IT enabled there may be as many as 40,000 point of service (PoS) systems which will be connected to the iEHR. These systems support a very diverse set of users and clinical settings. This is further complicated by the fact that each of these settings and/or users are independent businesses or organizational entities. High quality, safe and efficient healthcare requires that the clinical data for a patient be shared among authorized clinicians.

Federated records: The final major requirement they had was to interconnect each of the jurisdictional systems into one seamless, federated set of EHR Solutions. By creating this connectivity, a resident in Canada will have a complete clinical record regardless of where they got care in the country. Their record will “follow them” if they move within the country as well. Finally, for something like public health surveillance, it is an imperative to have interoperability across the country to detect and manage an infectious disease pandemic.

ROI

Agility: 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.

Savings & Cost Avoidance: An independent study of the cost benefits of the HIAL and iEHR was done for Infoway by Booz Allen Hamilton. They estimated that the 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.

Project Organization

Industry Subject Matter Experts: They had a core team of staff architects and standards experts that were part of the Solution Architecture Group at Infoway. Other core team members were from other departments including project managers, change management specialists and knowledge management specialists. This team was supplemented by contract subject matter experts that ranged from clinical experts (e.g. physicians, nurses, pharmacists) to technical experts in various areas (e.g. HL7, privacy and security).

Lessons

Infoway is currently addressing these shortcomings: (Service Design) They are creating more detailed implementation guides and specifications for the critical services that need to be defined and exposed in a common way across the country. They are also in the midst of defining their conformance strategy whereby these services, and other aspects of systems interoperability such as HL7 messaging and the use of controlled medical vocabularies, can be tested for compliance to the specifications and certified.

If they were to do this again, they would have worked more closely with the jurisdictions and their vendor partners to define these guidelines and specifications early on. This would have been followed up by consultations to build consensus on the solution definition.

CIO Magazine | SOA Consortium Case Study Contest: Judging Criteria

A few people have asked us how we determined the winners of the case study contest.  Rather than responding privately in email, we thought it made sense to post publicly about the process.  The judging criteria and process were devised by our Executive Suite working group, which is comprised of SOA practitioners, suppliers and me.  This is group also initiated the contest. 

To best explain the judging criteria, I'm going to start with the submission process.

The call for submissions:

"The competition is open to organizations of all sizes, including government agencies, which have successfully delivered business or mission value using a SOA approach.

The goal of the SOA Case Study Competition is 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 competition, the SOA project must be complete with demonstrated business results.

Entries will be judged on the complexity of the business problem addressed, the ROI/Business Value achieved (Agility/Innovation/Flexibility), the level and sophistication of the cross-organizational collaboration (Business/Technical) and the usage of SOA approaches and supporting technology. In addition to one overall winner, organizations will be recognized by industry/government and project size/scope."

During the submission process, entrants were given the following guidelines:

"SOA is focused on a business/IT alignment, and the case study needs to consider how SOA addressed a particular business challenge or problem. This is not intended to be a detailed discussion of technology, but a view of how business and IT can, with SOA, drive improved business value. Answer the questions as if you were trying to convince the CEO of the value of SOA to the organization. NOTE: Questions must be answered by a SOA Project Team Member."

Entrants were asked to answer 6 questions about their projects.  For each question, we provided some guidance and a word count limit.  The questions:

1. What was the business challenge or problem addressed by the SOA project, and why was SOA selected to address this?

2. When was the project started, how large was the project and how was it funded, and how long did it take to see results?

3. What was the planned and achieved ROI/Business Value (ie, improved agility, innovation, flexibility)?

4. How was the SOA Project team organized and what types of business staff were on the team? How was cross-organization collaboration (Business/Technical) achieved? Was a Center of Excellence (CoE) created?

5. What technology or software was used in the project? What vendors were involved? Was service reuse taken into consideration? What was the most complex technical challenge encountered?

6. What were the most significant lessons learned from the SOA project?

The Judging

There were 6 contest judges, all committed and announced as the contest went live.  This prior commitment was a good thing, because the submissions received far exceeded our initial projections.  After the contest closed, the submissions were validated and sent to the judges.  Accompanying the submissions were the judging rules and a tally-keeping workbook.  During the judging period, we held check-in calls to surface any questions on the process or entries and to keep us on task.

We used the following weighted scoring system:

Weight	Question(s)	Aspect
20%	1	Business Challenge
30%	2 & 3	Project Size, ROI/Business Value
30%	4	Collaboration
20%	5	SOA Approach

This gave us our first score, the total weighted score.  Judges could award extra points for lessons learned or any "wow" factor.  The weighted score plus the extra points gave us our second score, the total score. 

We selected the winners by reviewing both the weighted score and the total score.  In other words, we allowed extra credit to augment the scoring, not distort it.

As for the scoring the individual questions...

Question 1 - Business Challenge: 1 - 5 points based on the complexity / scope / criticality of the business challenge

Question 2 - Project Size: 1 - 4 points based on the project size and time to value; highest scores went to "large, quick projects", lowest to "small, slow projects"

Question 3 - ROI/Business Value: 1 - 8 points based on the business value type and span; highest scores went to "new value creation across a wide span", lowest to "SOA readiness at a small span".  Here is the matrix we used:

Question 4 - Collaboration: 1 to 5 points based on the degree of collaboration within IT, between business & IT, with external business partners and/or with customers.   Technology suppliers did not count as external business partners.

Question 5 - SOA Approach: 1 to 5 points based on the sophistication, appropriateness and execution of the SOA approach.

Reconciliation

Astoundingly, the six winning cases were at the top of each judge's scorecard.  From there, it became a simple matter of math to identify the overall winner, Synovus Financial, and the special recognition winners -- Canada Infoway, Con-Way, Penn National, SunGard, and US DoD AT&L.

As I've mentioned previously, there were really no "losers".  We received tons of great cases, full of insights and lessons.  I'll be mining all of those for fun facts and more.  Stay tuned.

Case Study Contest: Winning Characteristics

In a post on CIO.com's SOA Drilldown, Mike Kavis reports on eight characteristics common to our case study contest winners.  For each characteristic, Mike provides additional insights from his experience and/or relevant research.  The characteristics:

1. Strong Executive Level Sponsorship and SOA Evangelist
2. Educating the Business of the Value of SOA
3. Established a Center of Excellence (CoE)
4. Start With Well-defined Business Processes and Scale Up
5. Define Completeness of Work within Services
6. Quality Assurance Is Key
7. ROI Is Difficult to Achieve Initially and Is Realized Over Time
8. Deliver Substantial Business Value

Mike closes by imploring organizations to ignore general punditry and instead learn from these real-world cases:

"So for all of the pundits out there who claim that you should never talk to the business about SOA or that SOA is an IT initiative not a business initiative—look at the huge ROIs of these projects and the business transformations that occurred and reconsider those stances. I rest my case!

To summarize, make sure that your SOA initiative shares some if not all of the eight characteristics of successful SOA implementations. There has been so much chatter about SOA failures as of late. Now that we have six great examples of SOA successes, we should take the best practices that these companies used and put them to use in our projects so we can get shot at next year's prize."

For the details, check out the full article.  For more coverage of the case study contest, and the resultant ROI, see Boris Lublinsky's piece on InfoQ.

Synovus Financial's SOA Success bigger than winning SVP initiative

As we recently announced, Synovus Financial was awarded top honors in the CIO Magazine | SOA Consortium case study contest for a Secure Value Payments (SVP) initiative.  At the time, I also mentioned that more information from the winners and entrant pool was forthcoming.  Then, I promptly took a couple of days off.  Luckily, CIO.com's Esther Schindler was hard at work, following up with Synovus Financial on their entire SOA strategy.  In a new article on CIO.com, Esther discusses the SVP initiative, along with related technical and business wins:

"Synovus has had plenty of technical and business wins. Prior to the SOA implementation, Mize explained, customer and account information, funds transfer, credit card balances and intraday bank balances and transactions were not possible outside the branch channel. "Now this data has been integrated into call center, Internet and mobile banking channels using services from the banking and credit card legacy systems," he wrote.

The result is that the IT department could increase the business' ability to bring new products to market. For instance, Internet banking was the first company-level SOA project. As a follow-on, Mize explained, the business deployed mobile banking with less than 500 hours of IT involvement because the Internet banking Web services were reused in the mobile channel. "IT was able to bring great project ROI and business agility to deploy new products like SVP to the end customer," wrote Mize.

The company had plenty of "lessons learned," which may help your company in its own SOA adoption. For example, to make a success of the business IT architecture, Mize recommends, it's important to educate the business on design decisions that may compromise architectural principles. Leverage your business objectives to fund your SOA on a pay-as-you-go basis, he recommends; don't overbuild or over-promise."

Check out the full article, and friend of SOA Consortium Mike Kavis' piece on Why SOA Fails.

CIO Magazine | SOA Consortium Case Study Contest: And the winners are...

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.

Jeanne Ross to Keynote SOA Consortium's September 24-25 Meeting in Orlando

Have the recordings from our earlier meetings enticed you to attend one in person?  Well, if you are a SOA practitioner, you'll definitely want to join us in Orlando on September 24-25 as we do a SOA reality check and dig into sustaining SOA success.

Kicking off our SOA reality check, I'm thrilled to share that Jeanne Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist MIT Center for Information Systems Research, will be our keynote speaker.  In her talk, Jeanne will present new research on SOA Adoption & Value:

MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research and Diamond Management and Technology Consultants recently collaborated on research project surveying architecture leaders on SOA adoption, current practices, value and results and barriers to SOA success.

The research objective is to help those responsible for architecture better understand how their organizations stack up on a variety of key SOA metrics: investment, progress, reuse, and others.

In this presentation, Jeanne Ross will share the results of the survey analysis, including insights gained on the linkages, if any, between SOA initiatives and company financial performance.

And what would be a reality check, without real-world stories and lessons learned?  We have two great invited speaker sessions:

Dr. Michael J. Kurtz, Assistant Archivist for Records Services, Washington DC, National Archives and Records Administration, on Records Management in a Federal Service Oriented Environment

A multi-agency Records Management Service initiative has been undertaken by an Interagency Project Team composed of nineteen Federal Agencies under the leadership of the National Archives and Records Administration. The service is being developed in the context of the US Federal Government's over-arching approach to move to Service Oriented Architecture in the Enterprise Architecture of its agencies. This presentation provides an overview of the activities of a government Community of Practice defining and enabling a Records Management Service in order to realize the vision of Service Oriented Architecture in Federal Government.

 

Geoff Raines and Larry Pizette of MITRE Corporation on Leveraging Federal IT Investment – Using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

This presentation will explore SOA, as implemented through the common Web Services standards.  It offers Federal senior leadership teams a path forward, given the diverse and complex information technology (IT) portfolio that they have inherited, allowing for incremental and focused improvement of their IT support systems.  We will also discuss the SOA Trade space and briefly cover our project team’s efforts.

Rounding out our SOA reality check, our own Richard M. Soley, Executive Director of the SOA Consortium, will announce the winners of our case study contest, co-sponsored by CIO Magazine.  In addition to the announcements, Fill Bowen and I will share many of the SOA Lessons from Case Study Contest Entries.

And that's just Wednesday.  On Thursday, we focus our attention on sustaining SOA success.  After an invited speaker talk on SOA & ITIL, we'll have our first ever 'SOA Soapbox Derby'. 

The purpose of the SOA Soapbox Derby is to allow practitioners to exchange ideas on activities that are critical to sustaining SOA success.  Derby participants will have 10-15 minutes to soapbox, followed by another 15 minutes (or so) to engage in related conversation with meeting attendees.  Any practitioner attending the SOA Consortium meeting may participate in the 'SOA Soapbox Derby'.   For more information, contact me in advance, or onsite.

Thursday afternoon, we'll focus on community of practice activities, including the unveiling of the SOA Consortium Planning Framework. 

Interested?  For more information, including registration, please go here.