SOA Projects Need to Be Systematic, Exec Says

Computerworld - SAN DIEGO -- Over the past nine years, Con-way Inc.’s SOA has evolved into an event-driven architecture that lets computer systems subscribe to, publish and process “events” — such as the receipt of an order — based on predefined business rules. Maja Tibbling, Con-way’s lead enterprise architect, discussed the SOA’s development in an interview with Computerworld at last week’s Open Group conference.



What are some of the major lessons you’ve learned about developing an SOA, and what would you do differently if you were starting today?

One thing we did right was, as soon as we proved the concept on our first pilot, it was understood we were approaching SOA as a systematic implementation. I don’t see how it can be successful or valuable if you don’t do that. Otherwise, you are in constant struggle with development managers about who will do development.

We didn’t define an [ROI] metric upfront, so in our early progress we really had nothing tangible, [and] some business leaders really like to have a number. We had more IT-ish things that showed value, but we couldn’t quantify them in raw dollars. The organizational and cultural [changes] are huge — we could have done better with that. We also learned pretty quickly that we need to communicate often and thoroughly. We could have done more of that and better articulated some of the more intangible rules.



Not many companies working on SOAs have gotten to the point of doing complex event-based processing or managing by exceptions. Was that part of your vision from the beginning? It certainly was. We knew we wanted to do that level of complex event correlation and automation of business [processes]. If I see in one part of the country a weather-delay event and a road closure and some other event, then I know I have a problem, and I have to establish a different [trucking] route. Otherwise, those events are disconnected. This is being used very heavily in our collections arena, where you can start monitoring payment patterns and when to start sending customers nice letters to remind them [about payments].



You said that early on, you didn’t set specific metrics to measure ROI. How have you shown company executives a return from the SOA? By now, we have clear business examples, [but] upfront you don’t have those. You need to sell [users] on the idea, and you need an executive sponsor, preferably the CIO, who really buys into it and knows how to sell it to the business. Upfront, they’re going on faith a little bit. A lot of people will [struggle] because they aren’t figuring out how to do a systematic implementation. This is where they have to trust it will work eventually and stay with it.

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