SOA Can Be a Tough Sell

Computerworld - SAN DIEGO -- Many companies are banking on getting substantial financial returns from service-oriented architectures. But shifting to an SOA requires considerable changes in an IT department’s focus and its approach to internal operations, according to attendees at a conference here last week.

For example, Marriott International Inc. has identified SOA as one of its three strategic technology pillars, along with business intelligence tools and commercial off-the-shelf software. The Bethesda, Md.-based company is tapping SOA technologies to help shorten software development times and pull more value out of its legacy systems.

But to obtain those kinds of advantages, you need to “turn your organization on its side” and incorporate SOA into thinking enterprisewide, said Steve Wolf, Marriott’s senior enterprise architect. “What separates SOA from a minor technology change is the fact that this is a fundamental change in the way we do business,” he said during a session at The Open Group LLC’s Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference.

Demonstrable ROI

John Whitridge, Marriott’s vice president of enterprise architecture, said his staff is trying to link the benefits of an SOA to Marriott’s overall corporate goals of becoming more agile, bolstering customer service and growing revenue. Whitridge said the enterprise architecture team has also designed a “maturity model” — essentially a road map that outlines SOA principles and guidelines and highlights some of the incremental benefits expected along the way.

Con-way Inc. has seen a substantial return on investment from an SOA approach it has been using since 1998 that started with component-based development, said Maja Tibbling, lead enterprise architect at the San Mateo, Calif.-based freight transportation and logistics company.

The IT department can now change business processes as soon as an alteration is needed instead of having to rewrite code, Tibbling said. In addition, the SOA supports the electronic transmission of data to customs officials in Canada. That has slashed the average time it takes for one of Con-way’s trucks to pass through customs gates to enter Canada from two to three hours to less than a minute, she said.

But to get Con-way to where it is now, the company’s IT architects had to evangelize the SOA concept to software developers and business users alike. Tibbling said her team emphasized to the developers that they could stop doing common, “daily grind” coding. It also set up a services repository with clearly defined data describing the functions of different services.

“SOA is not something the business directly cares about,” she said. “You have to identify the value that they care about, and that is the value you sell.”

Hong Zhang, director and chief architect of emerging technologies at General Motors Corp., said the automaker’s first-generation SOA was instituted in 2000 to enable the development of an online vehicle showroom for users in 40 countries. In taking that first step, GM developed an SOA philosophy that the company still uses, Zhang said.

First, GM focuses on its core business functions and how those functions can work as services. Then the company turns its eye toward the technology needed to enable those services. “SOA is really about aligning IT capability with business intent,” Zhang said.