Many companies that have achieved early success with service-oriented architectures (SOA) focused first on small, incremental projects that show immediate returns to the business.
At the same time, some companies are struggling to gain a return on investment from large SOA projects. That has prompted several vendors, including Microsoft Corp., IBM and Mercury Interactive Corp., to step up efforts to add tools and services that can mitigate the risk of SOA development.
The IT operations group at Munich-based Siemens AG focused its initial SOA project first on automating and streamlining the processes for fulfilling internal requests to IT for new equipment, passwords and the like, said Thomas Buse, section manager of concepts and processes.
Once users from various departments started using that system for new workers, they asked IT to similarly automate and improve the processes in their departments, he said.
“[We] focused on those processes and activities, which appear hundreds and thousands of times per day,” Buse said. By reusing existing services to create new ones, he said, “we can really save money.”
By taking advantage of the SOA to reuse common corporate services, Siemens has cut the time required to implement new processes by 83%, said Buse. Now the company releases four to eight new business processes to run on its SOA every six to 12 weeks.
He explained the project and its benefits last week to attendees at the Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference in Redmond, Wash.
John deVadoss, Microsoft’s director of architecture strategy, said an incremental approach can help alleviate some of the SOA ROI backlash he’s hearing from some Microsoft customers working on very large projects.
Noting that an SOA is “fundamentally about aligning with the business,” deVadoss said that “the challenge with the big-bang approach is tends to diverge from the business very rapidly. There is a lot of risk that gets built up.”
Tracy LeGrand, chief architect and vice president of technology, strategy and architecture at Ameriprise Financial Inc. in Minneapolis, last week described SOA as a “journey that has incremental benefits.”
LeGrand outlined his firm’s SOA efforts during an IBM press briefing in which the vendor announced four new products, 23 product enhancements and 11 new services, all SOA-related.
Ameriprise began building a limited-focus SOA in 2000, long before the company was spun off from American Express Co. in September 2005.
The initial project, using IBM middleware and messaging tools, created services in three areas — customer management, asset management and money movement.
“We chose to implement SOA as a course of doing business,” LeGrand said. “We focused on the key services we needed to support the b
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