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SOA and Web 2.0: Putting It All Together

Dec 28, 2007

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This chapter is from the book 

New Language of Business, The: SOA & Web 2.0

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Governance Is Critical

If this book has done nothing else but convinced you of the importance of governance as your company moves forward, then that alone is worth its weight in gold. SOA requires an efficient business and technology governance mechanism to make sure that IT efforts meet business needs, and as a means of controlling what services are deployed and how those services are used.

Governance is designed to enable organizations to realize the full potential of flexibility. It addresses issues that, if left unattended, might be inhibitors to gaining the flexibility and time–to–market benefits associated with SOA—essential issues surrounding the lifecycle of a service. Effective SOA governance is more than just technology. It calls for a lifecycle approach that integrates an organization's people, processes, information, and assets.

In its internal use of SOA, IBM found governance to be that secret to success. "From our point of view, SOA governance is an integral and significant aspect of our overall IT governance, which includes managing process, applications, data, and technology," said Catherine Winter, Team Leader for IBM Enterprise Architecture Governance. IBM started by identifying the appropriate process and roles/responsibilities set up the IBM Architecture Board to govern and manage the SOA environment. This governance strategy helped optimize IT assets across the entire corporation.

Address these keys to effective governance:

Establishing decision rights for your SOA environment
Defining appropriate services
Managing the lifecycle of service assets
Measuring effectiveness
Changing the Culture
Aligning IT and Business

Case Study: People's Bank of China

China's federal bank avoids $1 billion in infrastructure and development costs and eases management of the country's treasury by implementing a nationwide real–time tax and customs payment–collection system based on an SOA.

Owned by the Chinese government, the People's Bank of China (PBC) has been the driving force behind the Chinese commercial banking market since 1949. PBC, which serves as a clearinghouse for the Chinese banking industry, employs approximately 100,000 people at 32 first–line branches, 300 second–line branches, and 2,000 third–line branches.

The federally run People's Bank of China (PBC) collects and processes tax and customs payments from all of China's 600 million tax–paying citizens. Historically, the nation's 32 provincial governments would first collect the payments from local banks and then submit the collections to PBC. Delays in this process, as money changed hands from the banks to the provinces and finally to PBC, allowed some provinces to accrue interest on the collections, which complicated management of the national treasury. To simplify and accelerate the process, PBC wanted to collect directly from the local banks. However, such a change would require it to integrate its tax– and customs–processing systems with thousands of different bank systems. The challenge was for PBC to create an efficient exchange system across all of China, without investing massive amounts of time and money in integration–development projects.

PBC can now collect tax and customs payments from the local banks in real time by leveraging a cost–effective SOA. By enabling seamless integration among the disparate banking systems, open standards–based software automatically routes roughly 13 million transactions per day between PBC and the commercial banks, while minimizing the need to hard–code integrations. PBC can efficiently add to or modify the services in the SOA as needed, to accommodate new requirements or implement new functionality with relative ease. PBC has seen business results of an estimated cost–cutting of approximately $1 billion in infrastructure and development costs by taking the SOA approach, and eased management of the national treasury by eliminating processing delays. In addition, it gained business flexibility—flex–pon–siveness*—needed to adapt and improve the exchange system in the future.

To accomplish these goals, PBC built an all–new treasury application infrastructure and SOA that will support more than 800,000 users. Through the SOA environment, they route messages (transactions) to and from the external institutions, handling about 13 million messages per day. To ensure a smooth development process for the system's real–time transaction applications, a team of 20 developers, 10 testers, five analysts, one project manager, and two executives added new processes and development methodologies to the SOA environment. Because of this focus on the Lifecycle of Service Assets through Development and Delivery, PBC will be able to reuse application components to integrate new applications quickly and maintain existing applications easily.

The business value of PBC's SOA environment is that PBC can now easily interface with more than 150 diverse merchant banking, tax, and customs institutions across China, effectively centralizing and standardizing the collection of national treasury information. Using the solution, citizens can submit tax and customs payments online in real time via their bank accounts. Tax preparation that used to require as much as four hours to complete can now be entered and submitted in less than ten minutes.

PBC is able to easily adapt to changing LOB requirements. The integrated environment helps speed the bank's development process and eliminates wasted resources.

In total, the integrated, SOA–enabled system will help PBC save more than $1 billion in national treasury infrastructure, maintenance, and development costs.

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