SOA Consortium Insights

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.

New SOA Consortium Podcast: David Butler on SOA Transformation

David Butler, Worldwide SOA Director and Chief Evangelist, HP, kicked off the SOA Consortium’s June meeting in Ottawa with an information-packed presentation on SOA Transformation.

Setting the record straight from the start, David shared “In many respects the SOA market has lost its vision around what SOA is actually trying to do. Not provide a new set of technology, but provide a transformation focused on a design point called a business service. A business service drives measureable business outcome.” David then shared examples of business outcomes from a semiconductor company, a financial services firm and an insurance provider.

David pointed out that successful SOA transformation is more than implementing software. Transformation spans people, organization, process and technology. On the organizational aspect, David called out the criticality of business-IT alignment for proper business service identification and implementation. “…how we map business capabilities in a consumer-provider fashion, and map that into IT systems and technologies. A business person should be able to consume and provide capabilities without knowledge of the underlying technology and platforms, and do that in a changeable manner.”

David shared a 10-point roadmap for SOA transformation, based on customer experience, that covered business service definition, center of excellence, SOA governance, execution architecture and platform, quality and provisioning, service lifecycle, data center operations, IT management processes and line of business engagement.

In closing, David stated, "SOA is a business-oriented architecture". Following his presentation, David engaged in Q&A with the meeting attendees on SOA transformation challenges, including security, business service definition and granularity, service-engineering, service chargeback and economic models, and the changing role of the CIO.

To listen to, or download the audio recording of David’s presentation and view the slides please go here. 

David's talk is the first of several podcasts recorded at the June meeting.  Next up is Jim Johnson of the Standish Group on Trends in SOA.

SOA Case Study Contest deadline extended until July 31, 2008

Risking the ire of the judging committee -- lots of submissions to read/score/judge already -- by member and community request, we are extending the submission deadline for the case study contest until July 31, 2008. 

Given our timeline, this is our first and last extension.  So, if you have a SOA story to share, please consider participating in the SOA case study contest from the SOA Consortium and CIO magazine.  For more information on the contest and participation, please go here.

SOA Consortium and CIO magazine launch Case Study Contest

Today, the SOA Consortium and CIO magazine are announcing the launch of a SOA case study contest.  The goal of the SOA case study contest is to highlight business success stories and lessons learned to provide proof points and insights for other organizations considering or pursuing SOA adoption.

Case study submissions must be for completed projects that used a SOA approach to deliver business value.   In keeping with our charter, we are not looking for dissertations on the technical beauty of the architecture and implementation. Rather, we are interested in the business story, the business value generated, the degree of cross-organizational collaboration, and the usages of SOA approaches and supporting technology.

For more information on the contest and participation, please go here.

Thanks to our Executive Suite SOA team and CIO magazine for putting this contest together! 

Looking Forward to 2008

As 2007 comes to a close, we look back on an amazingly successful launch year for the SOA Consortium.  From the 11 founding members in late January, only eleven months later membership is over 80, with the strong support of our five Sponsors (BEA, CISCO, IBM, SAP and Sparx Systems).  We're clearly seeing the convergence of a perfect storm: business agility, service orientation and business process management.  Frankly, it's about time.

In less than a year, the Consortium has delivered terrific podcasts on the move to SOA (several more were recorded last week, and will appear in January); a vision of enterprise architecture in 2010 that supports the move to service orientation; a remarkable string of feedback from SOA thought leaders from our Executive Summits; and an amazing array of case studies outlining what works and why we seek to move to SOA.  The business need for agility drives that transition.

So we have a lot to be thankful for.  So in this season of transitions, all of us here at the SOA Consortium hope you enjoyed a happy Diwali, Hannukkah or Eid or are looking forward to a Merry Christmas.  And we wish you a happy and peaceful New Year of 2008, and a successful transition to Service Oriented Architecture!  Thank you for your support!

December SOA Consortium Meeting in Burlingame, CA

Although I was scooped by our marketing folks, I want to brag about share, our great line-up for the Dec 12-13 meeting in Burlingame. We design our quarterly meetings for members and non-members to interact around the topic of business-driven SOA.

Our confirmed invited speakers are Sandy Carter, Judith Hurwitz and Amit Sinha.  Our Hot Topic Roundtable is on CIO SOA Concerns and features Sandy, Judith and our own Richard Soley.  Details from our press announcement:   

On Day One of the meeting, Sandy Carter, VP, SOA & WebSphere Strategy, Channels and Marketing, IBM, will give the presentation “IT needs SOA Skills,” while Judith Hurwitz, President, Hurwitz & Associates, will present “Planning for SOA 2008 by learning from SOA 2007.” Both featured speakers will join SOA Consortium Executive Director Dr. Richard Soley for a SOA Hot Topic Roundtable discussion on CIO SOA Concerns. Meeting attendees will have the opportunity to participate with comments and questions. The Roundtable will be recorded and made available after the meeting as an on-demand podcast. On Day Two of the meeting, featured speaker Amit Sinha, VP of Portfolio Marketing, SAP will present “The Business Case for Service Oriented Architecture - Business Network Transformation.”

For more information, check out the full agenda.  Registration is open to the public.  This is a great opportunity to interact with leading SOA thought leaders and practitioners in a sales-free environment.

Service Funding Models Survey

Successful business-driven SOA adoption goes far beyond embracing architectural principles and implementing services infrastructures. SOA, with its shared services and infrastructure, changes the planning, management and operational models of IT. One of these “business of IT” changes concerns the reinvention of funding and chargeback policies. Currently, this is an area with far more questions than answers. 

As a service to our members, and the broad SOA community, the SOA Consortium is conducting a survey to learn what methods and policies organizations are using, or planning to use, in respect to funding and chargeback of shared services and shared service infrastructure.

If you are actively considering or pursuing a SOA strategy, please take a few minutes to fill out our short survey.  The full survey results will be shared with the public in early 2008.  Todd Biske will discuss some of the early survey results at the upcoming Gartner AADI Summit.  Thanks!

SOA, BPM and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man -- Hot Topics Roundtable Podcast Now Avaliable

At our Jacksonville SOA Consortium Meeting, we held our second SOA Hot Topics Roundtable.  This quarter, we explored the relationship between SOA and BPM.  I asked our invited guests, Ashwini Ahuja from SDG Corporation, Sooraj Balgobin from The SOA Monitor and Brian Erickson from Hitachi Consulting to speak to one of four aspects of the SOA-BPM relationship:

1. Business Discipline

2. Methodology

3. Technology

4. Human Element

Similar to our SOA Governance Roundtable, the insights and conversation was pitch-free.  After each thought leader shared his opening insights, we launched into a roundtable discussion with all meeting attendees.  Many of the participants will be familiar as they are leading SOA practitioners.

The entire podcast is a little over an hour, the roundtable begins about 25 minutes in, and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man is discussed during Brian Erickson's opening remarks.  I also shared the SOA Consortium's view that SOA and BPM are complements.

Go here to listen to the podcast, view the slides, or read the full transcript.  As always, let us know what you think. 

For our December Hot Topics Roundtable, we've lined up Sandy Carter of IBM, Judith Hurwitz and our own Richard Soley.  We'll be addressing CIO level concerns, such as talking SOA with the CEO and SOA skills identification and development.  If you have suggestions for a future roundtable topic, please drop me an email brenda at soa-consortium dot org.

SOA Consortium Hot Topics Roundtable Podcast: SOA Governance Roundtable from Brussels Meeting

At our Brussels SOA Consortium Meeting, we held our first SOA Hot Topics Roundtable on SOA Governance.   The purpose of these Hot Topics Roundtables are two-fold.  First, it provides a great opportunity for our members to discuss important topics with recognized SOA thought leaders.  Second, via podcasts, we can extend that conversation to the broader SOA community.  Obviously, this post is notification of that extended conversation.  The podcast, along with supporting slides and transcript is now available on the SOA Consortium site.

The (product-pitch free) podcast features Fill Bowen from IBM, Ed Cobb from BEA Systems, Christian Hastedt-Marckwardt from SAP and the ever pragmatic Clive Read from Cisco Systems, speaking on the following aspects of SOA Governance:

• SOA Governance Program Capabilities
• Human Factors in SOA Governance
• Best SOA Governance Practices from the Field
• Ties to IT and Corporate Governance

In addition to the invited speakers, I acted as proxy for the SOA-C's community of practice, and shared their SOA Governance Considerations.

After the opening insights, about halfway through the podcast, all meeting participants engaged in an open roundtable discussion on SOA governance.

The hour-long roundtable was packed with great discussion on funding and chargeback strategies, realistic service versioning, governance program structures, governance decision-making criteria, the role of the enterprise architect, performance management and incentives, organizational change practices, and the need to focus on process before products.

Since you can get the full story from the podcast and transcript, I'm just call out a handful of excerpts from our thought leaders' opening remarks:

Fill Bowen on an evolutionary SOA Governance Program:

"Set up your SOA governance based on the level of SOA effort. So putting a Cadillac SOA governance system in place when your SOA effort is targeted at just trying to walk seems to be a little bit of overkill. One of the things we talk about regularly is, if you’re just starting out with three or four or five services and maybe one application, you don’t necessarily even need any tools. We’ve had customers that started out with a spreadsheet that kept track of their services. But, what they had was a SOA governance framework in place so that they could add over time. As the SOA effort increased, they could add more SOA governance capability and enforcement...

Focus on process before products...In the case of SOA governance, there’s really two processes involved...you have to think about SOA governance from first establishing governance and then executing governance."

Ed Cobb on the point of SOA Governance:

"So if you think about it (governance) from the point of view, what are you trying to accomplish, what you really want to do is figure out a way to minimize the conflicts that you are going to run across in making decisions. Because you want to make decisions in a way that allows all the stakeholders involved to think the decisions are being made fairly.

You want to enable collaboration because this is (SOA) not something the IT department can do by itself. This is something that’s going to require buy-in from all the stakeholders in the business. And, you want a structure that enables people to collaborate constructively."

Christian Hastedt-Marckwardt on Governance and SOA Success:

"We all hear that there are projects with high benefits and that there are projects with high failures. And the question mark out there when I talk to customers is, how do I make sure that I’m not on the failure side. How do I make sure that I’m on the winner side? SOA governance gives you the tools or at least the mechanisms to get you more on the track on actually going for all the benefits on the winner side.

Why is that? SOA governance is the key piece that actually helps you to link the different pieces, like the business strategy linking with the IT strategy, and with your solution portfolio planning and operations. You need to have those linkages and understand the holistic piece and how they are cross linked in order to have these projects going well. Governance, with all the roles and responsibilities procedures helps to safeguard your projects while you’re on the way. A key factor in showing how well you are doing on the IT side, is how (SOA) drives re-use in the enterprise. That’s one of the key indicators, not the key benefit, but of the key indicators that SOA project is being done well, or not.

If you are doing your SOA projects well, you accelerate your learning curve internally. And there is a learning curve involved. We all are here (SOA Consortium meeting) because we understand there is a learning curve --a lot of learning to do, and we are here to share learnings and experience --to accelerate our learning curve as a community. And governance done in a holistic way also gives you the right tools, gives you the ability to actually accelerate the learning curve."

Clive Read on SOA Governance, Feedback and Operational Performance:

"Last but not least, I’ve been involved at the tail end of IT programs where, guess what, the most important thing is operations because when all the development stuff has been done and cleared out of the way, operations is the thing that gets the attention at the top of the organization. Guess what, it’s the call center meltdowns, the network falling out, it’s all that kind of stuff, and that’s what gets the CIO the sack. So they’re kind of interested in that, and therefore, you do need these feedback mechanisms so you’re absolutely tapped into operational performance. You’re actually feeding that back into the lifecycle and take accounts of those things. In an ideal world, if you’re doing that upfront already, but you sure as hell have to when it hits the fan. So that’s where you’ve got to be."

SOA-C Community of Practice on Sanctioned Non-Compliance:

"...governance programs and processes have to anticipate and plan for valid deviations from standards, right. It’s always going to happen. It might be because of project timelines, quality service requirements, quality of protection requirements, and as we discussed earlier, it might be performance. So, you need to include in your governance program processes for variance and then processes for bringing whatever it is that varies back into the architecture. How are you going to do that? Especially with a timeline based variance. Perhaps you need to figure out at the time of the variance how to move forward. You agree to bring and the deliverable up to standards within the next three months, within the next release cycle."

Again, you can find the podcast here.  Let us know what you think.  At our September meeting, we'll be taking on the hot topic of SOA and BPM. 

Audio available from the Gartner Summit

Back in June I reported on a couple of SOA Consortium sessions at events in California and Tennessee.  In particular, there was a great panel at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit in Nashville, featuring several active SOA Consortium members talking about their SOA implementation experiences.

Thanks to the helpful folks at Gartner Events, we are able to post the audio from this excellent panel, which can be downloaded here.  At almost 14MB, it might take a few minutes to download, but it's worth a listen.  The insights from Nida Davis Roemer (CTO of the American Red Cross), Yoav Intrator (Chief Architect of Deutsche Bank) and our own Ground-Floor SOA leader, Surekha Durvasula (Kohl's Department Stores) are all worthwhile.

Our partnership with Gartner continues in December, with SOA Consortium sessions at both the Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit and the Enterprise Architecture Summit.  Don't miss us at these excellent, colocated events!