Key issues for implementing SOA

The primary issue that needs to be considered when implementing a SOA is that the entire organization is on board. If some parts of your organization are implementing an SOA and others have not bought into it, you will end up with similar issues as exist when an SOA is not implemented at all. Educating the entire organization in relation to why a SOA is being implemented and the benefits it can bring is the first key issue.

The second key issue comes down to the technology choices that will be made. There are many technologies available that tell you that they ‘do’ SOA, however, many still tie you into proprietary interfaces and technologies. Implementing a standards based SOA by choosing technologies that use standards like SOAP, REST, UDDI etc. can provide additional benefits:

• You are free to choose best of breed technologies that support the standards that you will use for each different service.


• You could potentially use different technologies that implement the same standards. While this may sound strange, one product may offer advantages in terms of cost or levels of support for different services that are implemented.


• In many cases, these technologies will be licensed based on how much you use them. This means that their cost is an operational cost as against more traditional models which require investment of significant capital up front.

Finally starting with a small effort can help you to develop implementation processes for your organization in a practical way thus helping you to improve your planning and delivering what your users want on time and within budget. The SOA Gateway provides the perfect tool to investigate how implementing a SOA may help in your organization.

Small or medium size Organizations and SOA

The first question one has to ask here is do you not see your organization being a medium or large organization in the future? If so this becomes rhetorically a question about where your organization will be in 5 years time.

SOA is more a business concept than a technical concept. One would have to assume that organizations are continually striving to improve their ‘services’ and the delivery of those services. The services your organizations provide are improved by:

• Speeding up delivery of the service.


• Removing red tape.


• Ensuring a consistent result when the service is used each time.


• Ensuring that when things go wrong (as they will), that you deal properly with the failure to the satisfaction of your customer.

From an IT perspective, exactly the same process applies. You should be looking at the parts of your services that are repetitive and thus take time. Identifying  where it make sense to use IT (for manual, repetitive tasks) and where it doesn’t (where a human being is absolutely needed) is the first step to mapping many of your existing manual procedures involved in a providing a service to lower level services that can be implementing efficiently and consistently using a SOA IT Infrastructure.

From that perspective, SOA is for every level of organization; while there is a perception out there that SOA tools and technology is too cost prohibitive for small organizations, this is not the case. There are many tools and services around for implementing SOA which charge based on usage which is cost effective for even the smallest organizations.

Is SOA for every business ?

Consider many large and successful businesses today and the amounts they spend on their IT. Each of these companies started out as small and medium sized enterprises and are spending literally millions each year trying to undo the IT short cuts they may have taken in the past.

Large companies now see the value of a SOA and what it can bring them in terms of costs savings and business agility and so are attempting to convert or move their systems to such an architecture.

So the question really is whether your organization intends to grow and become larger ? If it does, as I would expect all would aspire to, why not get your IT right now ? Implementing a SOA as early as possible provides the foundations to enable your business to scale from an IT perspective in the same way that you expect it will scale in terms of what the business does.

Not implementing a SOA now will mean you incur costs and delays into the future when your business begins to get bigger; and the tactical, stop gap decisions you may be tempted to take with your IT now will come back to haunt you in the future. The SOA Gateway is a tool that can help you to implement a SOA in any size or scale of business.

Soft savings when implementing SOA

Many organizations forget the soft savings that can be achieved by implementing a standards based SOA. ‘Soft’ savings are savings that are difficult if impossible to measure, however, with a standards based SOA there are many such savings that can be made.

A well implemented standards based SOA can deliver Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) with what used to be called OnLine Transaction Processing (OLTP) levels of service. This meant with green screen applications that it generally took less than a second for a response to be received once the enter or other interrupt key  was hit on a terminal. Consider early and current GUIs where response times can be measured in tens of second providing ‘delivery times’ more than ‘response times’ ?

It is well known that after a certain amount of time waiting, the operator of an application will lose concentration on the job in hand and thus will lose productivity.  Implementing a SOA can deliver the responses you need to keep your employees more productive and happier in their work. Nothing can measure this.

Implementing a standards based SOA introduces well designed structures for an application such that each piece of a process and where it is accomplished is well know. Each piece can feed information to monitoring tools so that when failures occur, they can be fixed very quickly if not before people notice due to the monitoring of the application. This leads to less down time of applications and again improves the productivity of the various processes in an organization.

Our final example is the potential to actively monitor what services are used most often, at what time and by whom. This sort of information can be invaluable for tracking where there may be problems in your business processes. While these processes may have been working for years, it may be possible to determine ways to improve them from the usage of the services. Improved business processes again lead to improved throughput and productivity for an organization. The SOA Gateway is the perfect tool to help you achieve soft savings such as these and others.

What hard savings may be made implementing an SOA ?

All organizations want to save money on their processes so that they can provide the same level of service to their customers at less cost. In addition, in the area of IT, companies would dearly like to have consistent costs associated with their IT projects. Implementing a standards based SOA can address both of these issues.

Most informed commentators would agree that up to 70% of the cost of medium to large scale projects is taken up integrating with existing systems or simply accessing existing data. This is because people continually build and implement proprietary integration software using Messaging Oriented Middleware (MOM) or other home grown solutions. This can be very expensive as it involves developing code on the back end system and on the front end and can cause major project delays into the bargain.

There are now products available that help you to implement a standards based SOA which makes your existing applications and data available using a configuration process. This takes up to 90% of the integration cost out of a project directly while also making the real data and applications available in days instead of weeks or months as occurs with traditional projects. This delivers hard savings in the project management and integration areas.

In terms of consistency of cost, this approach also delivers an ability to know how much it will cost to use more of such products. In other words, when it is necessary to integrate with newer applications or reach new sets of data, the cost can be calculate based on the license cost of the tool involved.

The fact that services created in this way can be reused leads to saving again and again thus increasing the Return on Investment (ROI) over time, improving the speed at which your projects can be completed and enabling  the costs of your IT projects to be determined with far more accuracy and confidence. The SOA Gateway is a product that can help reduce integration costs and give consistent costs for future integration projects.

Is using SOA more cost effective than other integration approaches ?

In today’s climate, all organizations are trying to reduce costs wherever they can. IT is one of the budget items traditionally hit when times are hard in that many organizations ‘batten down the hatches’ and stop spending on the basis that if it works as it is, then leave it.

However, no business can stand still and IT systems must be maintained to ensure they are still delivering a return for your business. There are two areas where implementing a SOA can save you money.

In the first case, if a project is implemented using a SOA approach but using proprietary interfaces, the costs of the approach will be similar as a similar amount of work is required. However, if a standards based SOA is used, up to 70% of the integration costs can saved due to the following:

-          With the right technology, SOA Services to make existing data or applications available can do this in minutes thus avoiding a large development cost as proprietary ‘plumbing’ to get systems to talk to each other is avoided.

 

-          Unit tests can be built for the SOA Services using off the shelf packages thus saving cost in terms of developing QA unit tests to test proprietary services.

-          Ultimately if the project can work with the existing data and applications effectively from day one, the project can progress as an integrated implementation from day one instead of attempting to join the front and back ends together towards the end of the project as happens in traditional integration projects.

The second part of the cost savings is based on further returns on investment as your organization develops. By using a standards based SOA you can reuse the services created again and again. For each time a service is reused, you are essentially saving the reimplementation of a proprietary version of that service again. Reuse of services also saves costs as follows:

-          Using the same service to do the same thing from multiple channels or technologies ensures that all of your users get the same result and are accessing the same data.

-          A single service ensures that when problems do occur with the service, it is clear what service is a fault and where to find it.
 

-          The standards based SOA approach can ensure that a database of your services is maintained so that programmers into the future can learn how to call the service without the need to understand specifications etc. though of course they will need to understand the data.

The bottom line is that implementing a standards based SOA can save you money up front and well into the future. The SOA Gateway is the ideal tool to implement standards based SOA in your organization.

There has traditionally been a gap between what the business wants from its IT and what IT can deliver. At its worst, many people on the business side consider the IT guys to be too interested in technology; while many IT people don’t always understand why the business asks for what it does.

The problem stems from the fact that up until now, there hasn’t really been a way for the business to express what they want and for the IT guys to fully understand it and why.

We need to consider that the business thinks in terms of process and what it takes to complete a ‘business interaction’. On the other hand  IT people tend to think in terms of transactions i.e. one ‘logical interaction’ with the IT system which either retrieves or updates one or more data records.

Using an SOA approach to this problem, it’s possible for the business and the IT to start sharing a common language. The business process must be broken down into what ‘services’ are required from the IT system. These services may be defined by:

-         What they achieve (e.g. creating an order).

-         What data is supplied as input (e.g. what the customer wants to order).

-         What data is expected as output (e.g. an order number).

While the business will see a full process as consisting of multiple services (e.g. receive order, place order on system, process order, deliver order, invoice customer, and receive payment), by defining the individual interactions with the IT system  (i.e. the services they want) they suddenly start speaking a language that the transactional  IT side understands.

The IT people then know what needs to be done, what data is received on input and what data is sent on output. How they implement and support this is up to them and the business doesn’t care once it does what they want. So both sides end up happy.

While it may take one or more cycles to get final agreement on the services, once they have been agreed, there is a formal ‘contract’ of sorts in place between the business and IT. As a small starting point, this shows how even during the planning phase, a SOA can provide benefit by getting the business and IT into the same camp as it were. The SOA Gateway is a valuable tool that can help the business and the IT people to create services with this in mind.