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This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

New Language of Business, The: SOA & Web 2.0New Language of Business, The: SOA & Web 2.0

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This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

New Language of Business, The: SOA & Web 2.0New Language of Business, The: SOA & Web 2.0

Learn More Buy

Unlock the Business Value Multiplier

The next step to SOA value comes when you start to link across the entry points of people, process, and information. This is when you start to realize a Multiplier Effect and your company's SOA business value accelerates. Creating entry points for SOA projects can deliver significant value on their own. People-, process-, and information-centric approaches yield results that can deliver strong ROI. However, the power can be exponential when clients apply SOA capabilities to people, process, and information aspects of a business in combination. We call this the Multiplier Effect and it changes the way you approach SOA.

The Multiplier Effect promises to deliver even greater value to clients by linking people, process, and information through SOA. The promise is that businesses will not only be integrated, but also built for change—built to adapt as market conditions demand greater attention by all parts of the business and shifts in resources. It's no great accomplishment to hard-wire a few databases to a user interface that, in turn, presents information mapped to a particular process. The real value is in creating flexible linkages of all three entry points in a dynamic environment. Clients are continually upgrading and changing processes, applications, databases, and views in the business. Through SOA, all parts of the business—its people, the key processes, and the critical information—can stay linked and supported through that continual change.

In Figure 11.3, begin your view from the center, where you can see the entry points we have been discussing. The companies that have started their journey have seen a higher ROI by combining the entry points of people, process, and information. This increase in flexibility and responsiveness comes from the focus on BPM and composite business services, which are made up of prebuilt, domain-specific modules that form highly customized applications. Composite business applications will become as predominant as the monolithic applications that exist today.

Figure 11.3

Figure 11.3 The flex-pon-sive* agenda through SOA

Those same companies, which have seen the value of moving up the stack, also see the power of the right infrastructure. Security, management, and virtualization are all different in a highly flexible SOA domain. These infrastructure services enhance resilience and security to accommodate decentralized services.

Add these items to your checklist:

  • After your first SOA project, begin to see the linkages of people, process, and information. As you incorporate an SOA approach to address an immediate business problem, progress on the path to a broader SOA enterprise adoption. These projects generally incorporate reuse and connectivity, and involve information, process, and people (see Figure 11.4).
    Figure 11.4

    Figure 11.4 SOA entry point scenarios based on more than 3,000 SOA engagements

  • BPM is more than a technology—it is a discipline.
  • Composite applications will blend with monolithic applications. Check out the SOA business catalog (at www.ibm.com/soa) to see where the future is moving.
  • Make sure you evaluate your infrastructure and management capabilities to support your SOA projects.

For a case study on the overall value of SOA and the impact of combining entry points, s.Oliver is a great example. Working with Sandra Rogers, Program Director, SOA, Web Services, and Integration at IDC, we explored this German company's approach to combining the SOA entry points and its best practices.

Case Study: An IDC Case Study: s.Oliver

(From the IDC whitepaper sponsored by IBM, "Service Oriented Architecture as a Business Strategy," doc 204313, November 2006)

Background

s.Oliver Bernd Freier GmbH & Co. (s.Oliver) is a multinational retailer of apparel and accessories for men, women, and children. Founded in 1969 in Rottendorf, the company is one of the fastest–growing textile companies in Germany. With more than 2,350 employees, the firm currently operates 49 mega stores under its own management and approximately 240 stores that it runs in conjunction with partners. Its continuously revolving collections are represented in 1,000 branded shops and departments, and distributed through 1,330 stores in over 30 countries throughout Europe. s.Oliver's aggressive growth strategy has the company in line to double its revenues from €820 million in 2005 to reach €1.5 billion by 2010, fueled by further geographic expansion and partnering models.

The fashion industry is very fast–paced as companies such as s.Oliver compete to stay ahead of the curve of consumer preferences. The firm must be able to quickly identify trends and turn over new products, continually introducing new styles and products to stay competitive. Such volatility places heavy demands on the firm's IT environment to be in lock–step with the business, with the latest product information, and subsequently support these offerings throughout all operational aspects of the business, from creation through the entire order and fulfillment process.

The company also must frequently enhance its web presence with features to support what has increasingly become a critical go–to–market and partner–integration channel. With its international reach, s.Oliver must support multiple languages and currencies, yet maintain strong brand control.

The Business Challenge

When Stefan Beyler, CIO and board member, joined s.Oliver in 2002, he and his team completely reviewed the company's entire systems and application infrastructure with an eye toward innovation. With many corporate divisions and an expansive product portfolio that typically turns over every four weeks, the firm's overall IT approach needed to be addressed in a whole new way. The company's systems environment had to better reflect the overall business strategy; therefore, according to Beyler, s.Oliver's strategy was not about installing a new application, system, or server. Its strategy was all about speed and agility. The firm must be able to recognize and exploit market trends in real time, apply modern logistics, leverage e–commerce and mobile technologies, and continue to promote a highly collaborative and creative corporate environment.

The company's IT staff of nearly 100 employees is responsible for worldwide operations, with a shared–services model supported by two major data centers, one in Germany and the other in Hong Kong. s.Oliver's IT environment is a heterogeneous mix of many applications that have been acquired over the past few decades, including two major ERP systems and varied database and information sources. Thus, the team needed to manage a tremendous amount of interface logic (estimated at 1,500 data interfaces), and with such a rapidly changing business environment, keeping pace was becoming a daunting and nearly impossible task. The cost of making changes to application integration logic, which required custom coding, was also a widening concern.

Beyler was faced with the challenge of creating an environment that could readily adapt to new business requirements and processes, and manage increasing volumes of information. With corporate expectations of maintaining efficiency and keeping down cost, holistically changing over the company's existing base of applications was not an option. Utilizing SOA to create an on–demand business environment was determined to be the ideal approach that s.Oliver needed, as it would provide the mechanism to address growth and change, yet allow the IT environment to evolve in an incremental fashion with minimal risk, disruption, and expense.

The SOA Solution

The company created the s.Oliver Federated Integration Architecture (SOFIA). In September 2005, s.Oliver's IT team began implementing information–centric services to support its highly critical order process and was live in production by the end of February 2006.

One of the critical requirements for s.Oliver's evolving SOA strategy is to utilize technology that can coexist and leverage its heterogeneous application and data resources. It is also important for the company that any new software introduced adhere to open standards for interoperability and investment protection, to minimize future vendor dependencies. The company chose to leverage an IBM suite for BPM enabled by SOA.

Another important part of the s.Oliver IT environment is its use of the people entry point and portal infrastructure to provide access to more than 250 applications and centralized information services, simplifying the user interface and addressing multiple languages the company must support. The portal also enables collaboration and distribution of critical information across the enterprise to facilitate faster processes and decision making.

One of the key business values behind the SOA construct is its inherent flexibility to address change, allowing s.Oliver additional speed to market. This platform allows the IT team to incrementally address new product requirements with minimal impact to upstream applications. The company is recognizing significant cost savings from the reduced efforts of the IT staff to continually maintain hard–wired integration logic.

By applying its SOA strategy, the IT team has thus far been tremendously successful—a sure sign is the volume of requests flowing in from the business. "An interesting point to note," stresses the s.Oliver CIO, "is that the business stakeholders do not see these as SOA projects, nor do they need to have any technical understanding of what a service entails. It is all about providing the business with what it needs."

To facilitate achieving this level of business alignment, normally a business leader is involved with each project to provide that critical link. A team of eight IT professionals is dedicated to the overall SOA strategic agenda. However, for its long–term success, the entire IT community must support the vision and adhere to the reference framework.

Beyler points out the criticality and complexity of outlining and addressing all the processes involved for SOA governance. This includes guidance on how to determine and document requirements, development practices, versioning, monitoring and management, security, and assignment of responsibilities for the many tasks involved in creating and maintaining services. The CIO notes that there is a lot to learn, and it requires a good level of process understanding. The company already had a robust IT governance practice in place; however, it needed to add "SOA thinking" to the equation. To support further automation and SOA governance, the team also anticipates it will leverage a services registry and repository solution in the near future.

Lessons Learned and Looking Ahead

According to Beyler, "SOA is a business project, not a technology project," and the most significant contributor to its success is addressing the people aspect of the equation. This involves rallying support throughout the entire IT organization, convincing developers through IT operations to cooperate across the many processes and dimensions of SOA design and governance. One activity that Beyler noted to be extremely useful was arranging for IBM SOA training for the s.Oliver IT staff. He noted it was very helpful to have the workshop's agenda address the many activities and roles throughout the IT and SOA lifecycle.

Success, however, involves cooperation and acceptance across the entire business. Many IT organizations look to corporate management to help drive cooperation in the development and use of new technology. However, to Beyler, it is the IT department's ultimate responsibility to drive adoption throughout the company by providing good portal and application features and functions that have an impact on the business.

One of the next technical milestones the company has set its sights on will involve combining operational and nonoperational data within its SOA environment, to support both transactional and data warehouse services. Another will be incorporating service orchestration on top of its Enterprise Service Bus to facilitate functional and process service requirements. Another key business requirement for s.Oliver will be to support offline processing; thus, Beyler and his team will be investigating how to incorporate an SOA–managed client capability.

For s.Oliver, SOA is seen as an enabling competitive differentiation for the company, allowing the company to rapidly introduce new products to market across its many businesses and lines. From a business perspective, the company plans to address functional business processes within its SOA environment to take advantage of the flexibility this architecture enables, including tasks involved in bringing products from design through production, supply chain management, and sales.

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