BUSINESS CASE FOR SOA OFFER (SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE)

Purpose

Services oriented IT strategy is a key strategy in the approach to IT Architecture and business driven integration solutions from both IT System vendors, IT systems integrator / service providers and Business.

This paper briefly outlines the key IT issues facing organisations and how the Service oriented Architecture (SOA) approach has been adopted as a major strategy.

Definition of SOA/ESB

Service Oriented Architecture / Enterprise Service Bus (SOA/ESB) is both a design strategy for business oriented IT Architecture and a set of specific technologies that enable integration and encapsulation based on emerging and established industry protocols and information standards.

2 Business case

Business Strategy and IT Architecture

Often business areas and whole corporations have strategic business initiatives that are in varying degrees of definition and alignment with the current capabilities of the Information Technology systems and services supporting them.

The underpinning IT infrastructure, the networks and the data and applications running on them are in constant use and development.

The challenge is to align the business strategy with the right IT architecture and services to deliver superior business performance with new business processes that are agile and responsive to new products and market demands. Yet at the same this must all be achieved with new ways to reduce costs of development and increase speed of deployment of IT under increasing challenging and complex technical environment of new and legacy systems and information asset.

SOA seeks to address this through innovative new architecture design strategies that change the way IT is define and design through encapsulating services, decoupling the technology layers to minimize change impact and enable reuse.

Defining the Business Case

A core principle used in the Catalyst framework is the definition of strategy from a current to a future state and treating this from a holistic view covering a range of transformational change dimensions including technology, people and processes. This strategic orientation is central to the philosophy of CSC and the methods deployed in all client work.

The current Transformation view covers the business case as derived from the roadmap Shape, transform and Manage stages and the five dimensions of change in POLAT. The business case in this context is defined in three levels covering:

• Business Roadmap

• Establishing performance targets (direction setting activities)

• Establishing Operating Model requirements (covers all five dimensions of change)

• Establishes Operating Model Capability Requirements (analysis activities)

• Solution Roadmap (Covers all five dimensions of change)

• Establishes Business solution requirements (conclusions from the analysis activities)

The business case is then defined as the roadmap to move from the current state to the future state with a set of metrics and value targets.

Services oriented architecture is a key IT strategy in achieving this

Overall themes of the current Industry climate

Rapid pace of technology based development

Global competitiveness

Multiple new technology channels to market (Web, Mobile, IVR)

Significant legacy of IT Assets estate to maintain and migrate

Culture and governance challenges to transforming new initiatives

Evolving technology standards and technology investment decisions

New open standards capabilities in applications platforms and communication protocols

Core Issues

1. Duplication and access to IT Assets

Significant islands of data and application silos that represent valuable information and functions that are potentially duplicated across enterprise and local operations with challenges to reconciliation and access to new and legacy IT assets

1. Cost of development / change

Multiple programmes of work with incremental development and changes.

Aim for decoupling of data and applications and integration layers to enable reuse, expansion and minimise impact of changes. Minimise [payback periods for change increments; run maintenance and development programmes concurrently to maximize reuse.

1. Channel expansion

Integrating the flow of activities and making the right supporting IT systems and information services available to the right people and business processes is a key challenge.

1. Partner Integration

Many business processes involve multiple activity steps across systems. Many business processes are now collaborative with external organisations and customers resulting in the need for management of access and delivery of products and services to these communities.

1. Standardisation

Different operating systems, network protocols and data format standards creating the need for translation and access methods to share data and functions between systems. The challenge of designing interfaces and exposure of these systems and data needs robust IT standards to enable this

1. Scaling for delivery, performance and security

Scaling for volume;defining the level of protection needed in the architecture, controlling the access to services; making the right choices in technology and the design patterns for architecture to meet your current and future business needs

1. Strategic process capabilities

Competing pressures from business initiatives to drive existing and new products and services to current and new markets. How to align the Operational Model with the business strategies to meet the demands of business services. How to define strategic competencies and emphasis for strategic capabilities

1. Compliance

The compliance of industry governance in financial and operational terms to ensure security and separation of client information and trace and actioning of business activities to meet Sarbane-Oxley and other industry specific compliance issues across multiple business activities and systems.

1. Conventions, Governance and leadership

The emergence of standards such as web services resulting is different interpretations of the meaning and approach to what services oriented design and architecture means.

How to improve the current operational model with delivery methods for . How to promote a shared responsibility for standards and use of IT across business and IT project initiatives such that a roadmap for achieving services and capabilities is successful

1. Technology Investment choice

Different levels of maturity and capabilities in current and new technology. How to select, migrate and turn these technologies into useful platforms.

Current State of Business and IT Landscape

• High duplication and reconciliation costs of data

• High development costs in IT

• Duplicate messaging and interfaces with restricted access for reuse

• Needs to multi-channel services

• Performance and ongoing running costs of legacy and services

What is the opportunity for Companies ?

• reduced duplicate data and reconciliation costs

• improved information quality

• reduced duplicate business processes

• enable new channel services

• reduce dependencies between legacy and new technologies

• reduce time and IT development costs from reusable interfaces and services

What is SOA? What are the essential features?

• Data and Information is treated as a Common Data Model that can be reused across multiple business and system areas

• Common Data Model – ensure re-use at modeling and runtime, and manage ownership

• Data duplication and reconciliation are reduced, data quality is improved

• Common naming and industry conventions enable collaboration and services deployment/sharing

• Business activities (functions) are defined as reusable services where common activities are required by many parties or systems

• Service oriented – simplify presentation of services, re-use common services

• Centralising common services can reduce duplicate interfaces and application development and investment

• Technology components and data are encapsulated by additional Integration standards (e.g. J2EE, .Net) and integration technology platforms that enable them to be seen and called as discrete “business services”

• Decouple – minimise dependencies between participating applications (data, function, technology and process). This enable reuse of legacy systems and improves migration of new functions or replacement of older platforms independent of impact on end users.

• Business activities are no longer viewed as Application functions but as business services

• Exposure Design of APIs and Channel Devices enables generic common interfaces and presentation services

• Minimal use of native application services in the architecture, use good quality application touch points

• Syndication and advanced new media channels for Web, Mobile services can be deployed from current infrastructure systems and services by designed APIs and gateway facades that can be called or delivered as “Services” to requesting systems inside and external to the organisation

• Business events are managed across applications and business enterprises and not limited to just internal to a specific platform or application

• Implement process management & orchestration as a supervisory (not embedded) set of services

• Automation and self-service capabilities can be developed based on a “Catalogue” of common service and data improving information availability and process capabilities.

• Introduce new Network and infrastructure services that are appropriate for the business transaction volumes and type of channel service functions required . e.g. B2B automation; master data syndication; or Customer self service Portal or Call Centre account management.

• Reduce the number of systems and interfaces through carefully migrated and managed IT estate management

• Pick appropriate patterns depending on nature of interaction

• Automate common data and event activities through service based integration

• Reduce cost of IT development through careful management of IT and its reuse through a services orientated framework of interfaces, data and functional service encapsulation

• Manage the portfolio of integration technologies

• Governance of requirements and IT deliver such that duplicate or incompatible systems and development are managed

• Increase speed of change of IT and new product and service introduction by specifying processes and systems and “service specification”. The design and development of these with new integration and schema standards enable generic reconfiguration and “pre-integrated” APIs, applications and services that can increase throughput of subsequent enhancements or changes.

• Position for ‘enterprise-readiness’ from day 1

• Ensure modular services to support incremental programme delivery / spend

What is the Services orientated response?

What are the critical activities for organisations following an SOA/ESB path?

• Data strategy

• Technology platform standards

• Process services strategy

• Cohesive strategy for migration and design

• Governance

• Scaling for delivery, performance and security

• Right size and right patterns

• Right technology choices to meet business locality, channels and uses

What are the critical design issues for SOA/ESB?

• Technology

• Establishing Technology standards for interfacing and integrating data, applications, networks and overall platform frameworks to enable access and management of the IT Infrastructure is a modular component and holistic way

• Business Services

• Establishing business services that need to be available centrally; distributed across business units; provided to external partners and customers ; and through multiple channels (Web, Mobile, IVR ..)

• IT Reuse

• Establishing the granularity of what IT Architecture components and

• Protocols

• Establishing definitions a for messages, application interfaces; underlying data standards and exposure and communications, security and access to the IT services

• Governance

• Establishing a framework for standards and technology requirements and development to support reuse and encapsulation.

What is the business value for Services orientation architecture?

Target benefits

• Increase revenue generation or protection

• Reduce IT development and asset costs

• Risk Reduction

• Better information and decision quality

Quantifiable Benefits

• Revenue generation / protection

• Cost savings

• Information Quality

• Service continuity

Non-quantifiable benefits

• Decision Quality

• Customer experience

• Loyalty

• Brand value

What are the barriers to SOA/ESB ?

While the drivers to block the move to SOA/ESB are no different to may common IT project challenged there are some significant differences that create a real difficulty in organisation not prepared:

• Definition of what is SOA

• Clarity over the strategy of SOA as a Business Capability. There is often a lack of understanding as to what the SOA capability is and other terms are often mixed up with it e.g. Web Services (a industry standard of exchange)

• Definition of data and schemas

• The standards for data and schema protocols preventing sharing and orchestration can often mire SOA projects as they try to deal with the “double wammy” of duplicate / inaccurate data sources and exposure and orchestration of realistic service events.

• Dysfunctional nature of organisational Structure

• The ability of functional business areas to think of services and products in a cross-functional way challenges their independence and current mindsets.

• IT Programme Structure

• The current focus of programmes to deliver functionality within a programme scope rather than as an organisational capability framework such as that demanded by Services oriented implementation

• Skills

• The ability to define new data and functional models as services challenges the existing staff skills, mindsets, business process models and information models collected over time with legacy non-services specific developments

• Governance

• Maintaining control is particularly difficult over a large organisation with widely varying local standards and IT systems. The ability to realize benefits of SOA is often critically dependent on the ability of organisational to hold a steady course on delivering services

• Right Technology Service patterns

• The use of the wrong messaging design patterns and implementation run-time architecture to support the volumes and original performance expectations

• Organisational Maturity

• With the learning curve introduced in SOA /ESB development there is often a lack of understanding an approach to SOA programme delivery. The expectation of delivery a complete set of services requires a roadmap that takes account of the stages of maturity that the data, infrastructure, network and processes and enterprise relationships are currently at. There needs to be a progressive move built on sound data and interface APIs before “trying to run” with full orchestration and service design.

Roadmap for successful SOA

CSC delivery tools for SOA

What are the key areas that CSC can provide to address the roadmap

The following set of work product objectives have been defined for the SOA Offer

• Business Case for SOA

• A positioning view of CSC for SOA to a C Level Audience

• Identifying how to define a business case and roadmap for achieving SOA capabilities

• Architecture Roadmap

• A

• Aligning this with the LEF Enterprise Services Integration (ESI) offer

• Aligning this with the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and the SOA/ESB Guidebook

• Vendor specific positions on SOA

• How to achieve SOA solutions with specific Vendor technologies in

• Having reviewed and defined a roadmap and strategy, what are the tangible actions to achieving

• Catalyst and CSC group Delivery Methods

• Identification of specific

• Delivery competencies

• SOA/ESB Practitioners Guide

Stakeholder/Focus Group / reading Order for the Deliverables

• Scoping work Group

• Lunch & Learn Workshops

• External validation/research

• Selected Vendors

• Account Directors

• Suggested list

• IBM

• BEA

• Tibco

• Others…

• Final Work product deliverables

Communications and roll-out

The current strategy is to define a set of draft deliverables listed above by the following process

• Conduct first review and expectation setting with above (ADS and nonADS) Stakeholder list- agree work-product deliverables beyond white paper scoping

• Research and write White Paper and slides presentation

• Conduct First review and expectation review with above (non ADS) stakeholder list

• Conduct Lunch and learn review sessions with above (ADS) Stakeholder list

• Second review and expectation review with above (non ADS) stakeholder list

Mark Skilton,

March 2005

#SOA #ROI