CIOL: What is the traction in the SOA business so far?

David Nichols: No technology advance is having a more profound impact on information technology and business processes today than the emergence of service-oriented architecture (SOA). In today's competitive global markets, companies are under pressure to achieve high performance through improved productivity, faster time to market, greater flexibility and a more effective workforce. Achieving these goals requires them to make more effective use of IT — posing huge challenges for CIOs to deliver simpler, more flexible systems at a lower cost of ownership. This must be accomplished despite the fact that corporate IT systems are heterogeneous, with multiple products across multiple platforms.

Accenture believes that SOA holds the key to meeting these challenges — a view shared by many of the leading analysts. SOA is a services-based approach for designing and building flexible IT solutions, easily combining legacy and new technologies. It enables business process components to be assembled and orchestrated efficiently and rapidly, giving businesses the agility to respond to changing business conditions and delivering distinctive business services. For internal IT organizations, it enables simpler systems that are cheaper to run, can be modified easily and integrate better with other platforms. In this way, SOA provides for success in today's business conditions, while also enabling the flexibility required to sustain that success into the future—a key driver of high performance.

 CIOL: What is the rate of SOA adoption among your customers in India vs international?

DN: Organizations adopt SOA incrementally. Organizations evolve through four distinct phases of the SOA Maturity Model, each one with several iterations before achieving the next step.

CIOL: Are you witnessing customers gone beyond the experimental stage to actual implementation?

DN: A lot of Accenture’s customers are actively pursuing SOA implementations and have a long term commitment to SOA. Most early adopters have moved past experimental stages, while a significant number are committed to the overall SOA vision.

 SOA adoption is on the increase

1) 2006/07 High Performance IT Research (250 CIOs)

- 56 percent doing something with SOA (Proof of concept, Pilot, Committed)

            * About same as 2005…but slight increase to pilot and committed

* 40 percent in pilot or committed -- but 60 percent expect to be in those phases in  one year

- 32 percent Reading and Monitoring

            * Up from 25 percent in 2005

2) Study shows that integration remains biggest reason for SOA, but focus will shift in future to new applications and portal development.

CIOL: What is the key business advantage to be derived from an SOA setup?

DN: SOA is a foundation that allows companies to fluidly combine existing and recent IT assets to deliver new applications, business processes and business models inside and outside the enterprise. A services-based architecture supports high performance by helping clients to quickly assemble and deliver services that can be reused across the organization. As business needs change and new opportunities arise, an organization can easily change and create new business processes without being encumbered by legacy IT systems underpinning the processes.

Clients ask about SOA for different reasons. Some hear it will more effectively address the age-old integration challenge. Others are looking for architectural flexibility. But others are beginning to understand the true business potential that SOA can help unleash, such as more flexible business processes and ability to deliver new business services. An effective services-based approach can enable both business and IT benefits, including:

 ▪     Bridging business and IT to enable the building of new capabilities;

▪     Improving business performance by harnessing the full strategic power of IT;

▪     Driving cost reductions by promoting the reuse of assets;

▪     Boosting ROI of the business solution enabled by an SOA foundation;

▪     Reducing integration and application development complexity through the use of standards; and

▪     Enhancing architectural flexibility by enabling the building of composite solution

CIOL: How SOA can enable businesses gain a strategic competitive edge?

DN: The emergence and take-up of web standards, and the maturity of SOA now provide a compelling value proposition:

–            Alignment of technology and process – A well-designed SOA requires extensive business participation — which ultimately allows IT to deliver services faster and provide business solutions vs. strictly implementing application functionality.

–    Lower cost of integration – Reduce the high costs to support and maintain duplicate logic. Reduce cross-channel inconsistencies, and expensive manual investigations. Ease connectivity, data exchange, and process integration efforts.

–            Improved customer experience – Reduced time to market for new capabilities. Consistent data regardless of channel used (e.g., phone, customer service representatives, Web).

–            Enhanced flexibility – SOA enables a new way of building business capabilities via composite solutions in a flexible and standardized manner. It allows for the recombination of services when processes need to evolve to meet new business challenges.

–    Re-use of existing assets and services – A services-based architecture focuses on enabling the reuse of existing assets through the creation of business services. SOA allows for the assembly of business services to support one or more business processes and avoids standalone or siloed applications.

–            Standards-based approach – Standards-based compatibility versus proprietary integration technology reduces complexity. It allows future solutions to “plug-in” to existing, standard services.

–            Interoperability – Solutions become less dependent upon the underlying technology platform.

SOA allows IT to address business needs, strategic initiatives, and implement large-scale systems within a business context, enabling new capabilities that are guided by a client’s key business drivers such as:

•            Business Opportunities

–    Prepares an organization to support Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A)

–    Facilitates outsourcing of applications/business processes

–    Information sharing with external business units/organizations (B2B)

–    Providing consistent data/results across multiple access channels (e.g., IVR, CSR, Web)

•            Industry Mandates

–    Regulatory requirements (e.g., Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA)

–    Standard transaction protocols

•            Technology Adoption

–    Facilitate implementation/integration of large-packaged applications/solutions (e.g., ERP, CRM, Claims processing systems)

–    Enable development of composite applications

–    Flexible standardized enterprise architecture

CIOL: What are the challenges involved?

DN: While the value and promise of SOA adoption is compelling, there are some significant challenges:

 –            Misunderstanding SOA and the potential benefits – There is a tremendous amount of hype around SOA as well as mixed definitions.  An organization should solidify there own definition of SOA and its benefits to their business.

 –  Developing the SOA capability (beyond the technology) – While SOA has a significant impact on Integration technology, it affects many components of the IT organization and processes.  Understanding broader impacts and change program required to adopt SOA will help ensure technology investment is leverage appropriately and anticipated benefits are realized.

–   Defining, Building and Governing Services – Becoming service-oriented versus application-oriented is the key mindset change with SOA.  Subsequently, the capability for creating and governing services is fundamental.  Without a clear direction on how to define and build services, benefits such as reusability may not be realized.  Governance is equally as important to ensure service-orientated design is embraced and service reuse is enforced.

 –  Enhancing the Integration capability and building the intelligent network (BPM, ESB) – This challenge will vary by organization depending on their current experience with EAI and BPM.  However, orchestrating services versus creating application interfaces will have impacts on the usage of the technology platforms.

 –   Governing the journey towards an enterprise-wide SOA – Developing an enterprise-wide SOA will take a significant amount of time and commitment.  It will require a series of projects managed as a part of a broader roadmap to ensure benefits are achieved.

 CIOL: What are the best practices in SOA adoption?

DN: These disciplines are required to deliver SOA:

•     Governance is crucial to defining and executing an SOA Strategy. This function should contain both business and IT leadership to ensure alignment and value realization.

•     Adopting SOA at a large scale must be aligned with an Enterprise Architecture with architecture decisions managed in the context of business objectives and priorities.

•     A reinvigoration of Business Process Acumen is required to create and ultimately achieve the value in adopting SOA.

•     Solution Delivery will need to evolve to support Service development, Composite Applications and a Service Oriented Integration Architecture.