Exploring an SOA Business Scenario

Below depicts a hypothetical approach to SOA as an alternative to conventional integration. This exhibit shows a fictional insurance company with three business units—Group, Voluntary, and Individual—at the top. Corresponding to the three business units are their own collections of systems and duplicate IT capabilities, accumulated over the years, and purportedly so unique that the business units must have their own systems to accomplish the very same business processes.

Typical IT System Silos




Each business unit has duplicate systems for sales and contact management, enrollment, claims, settlement, policy administration, and management reporting and controls. On top of these, all the business units have portal, intranet, and extranet capabilities to allow self-service for customers, agents, and brokers.

Identify SOA Business Opportunities
Exhibit 1.3 examines this hypothetical business from an SOA perspective, exploring the potential business value that SOA may bring to this enterprise. What if the duplicate IT systems and business processes could be integrated and united as shared services by all three business units? What if the business processes across the three business units could be simplified to take advantage of shared IT services in an SOA model?

Exhibit 1.3: Identifying SOA Business Opportunities





As shown in the exhibit, SOA offers several potential business benefits to this organization, such as product and process simplification, integrated systems, integrated business services, better customer satisfaction, cost reductions, increased revenue and margin, and better agent and/or broker productivity. Of course, you cannot realize these potential benefits without performing proper analysis.

Examining the SOA Information Technology Potential
Continuing the example, Exhibit 1.4 shows specific SOA opportunities that may apply to this insurance company. These opportunities include integration, process orchestration, better interoperability, services reuse, improved IT productivity, and achieving a real-time, event-driven enterprise.

Exhibit 1.4: Identifying SOA Opportunities





Again, proper analysis and SOA planning of the business and SOA opportunities will determine the unique SOA value that will apply to any given organization.

Seeking Reuse Value from an SOA Initiative
Let us assume that services reuse is a key SOA driver for this insurance company. Our SOA strategy, planning, and analysis will identify significant services reuse benefits in many areas of this company, across the multiple business units, and across the IT systems that support them. Exhibit 1.5 focuses this example on services reuse. In this 1insurance company, it was determined that reuse was essential to reducing costs, increasing IT productivity, and improving responsiveness to business demands.

Exhibit 1.5: Services Reuse in an SOA





This example shows how analysis might show that reuse of specific IT capabilities may offer tremendous business value. In this scenario, we focus on the enrollment process, which is supported by an excellent system but which can be improved by exposing its capabilities as shared reusable services in an SOA. Doing this allows reuse of a single IT service, enrollment, across three business units. This reuse eliminates IT complexity, increases IT productivity, and leads to simplified business processes in this organization. SOA applies as much to business processes and enabling better business functionality as it applies to IT systems—eliminating redundant systems, duplicate support infrastructure, and fragile and expensive integration strategies.

Service and Process Orchestration in an SOA
Furthermore, this same organization is able to leverage its reusable services by orchestrating them into business processes. Service and process orchestration extends reuse benefits by leveraging services as reusable composite applications and orchestrated process work flows. Exhibit 1.6 shows the enrollment process as a simplified series of services orchestrated into the business process work flow that the company decides is most reflective of how it wants to operate.

Exhibit 1.6: Orchestrating Processes in an SOA




SOA allows an organization to stop integrating and instead recast its IT capabilities as shared reusable services. Once there are enough services to reuse in an SOA, further value can be harvested by orchestrating business processes based on these reusable services. In addition, the integration challenges that have historically plagued IT organizations can be avoided. Implementing the SOA scenario just described enables an organization to realize the many business benefits of SOA.

SOA: Competitive Advantage via Services
SOA is a concept that has direct business and competitive advantage implications for all organizations. For the business, SOA means increased customer satisfaction, real business agility, faster time to market, ease of partnering, and lower business costs. Imagine that you can launch new products and services 30% faster than your competitors because you have eliminated friction within your enterprise, allowing better collaboration between your suppliers and your design engineers as well as better collaboration with your channel partners.

Your SOA has allowed you to speed up IT delivery to your business consumers. The time to implement needed system changes to support these new products has been cut by 25%, and you are able to make these changes using fewer resources: less development resources, less quality assurance resources, and less overall IT resources. Exhibit 1.7 depicts typical business benefits of SOA.

Exhibit 1.7: Business Benefits of SOA







For IT organizations, SOA means greater productivity, faster time to market, greater asset reuse, agility, and lower IT costs. What if you could deliver IT services with less budget and few resources, while providing faster, higher-quality application support? SOA benefits an IT organization through faster application development, lower overall costs, greater software asset and services reuse, more repeatable software development processes, higher-quality applications via pretested components and validated Web services interfaces, and overall faster response to business customer requests for system enhancements and modifications.

SOA benefits the business through greater flexibility, faster time to market for business initiatives, faster response to business changes, and closer mapping of IT services to business needs. Many analysts see SOA as a mechanism to help finally achieve alignment of business goals and objectives with IT services and capabilities. Better alignment is partly attributable to the speed with which Web services can be developed and deployed in an SOA as well as the flexibility from leveraging proven, tested software components and Web services.

SOA also benefits an organization by abstracting business services (or Web services) from the specific technologies they were originally developed with and the platforms they were meant to run on. This twofold abstraction has two key benefits: (1) an organization can modify the technology architecture without mandating changes to the services available, and (2) the business community can change business processes without causing the ripple effect of changes to the services and underlying IT systems. Doing this leads to greater business agility and IT flexibility.