What is the philosophy behind the new initiative? SOA has to be led by the business process, not by the technology. You can change your application by changing the business processes as they are defined in a modeling tool without having to change the application code. That is the core of the benefit of SOA. The application software and then the platform on which it runs are a means to an end. Like client/server or Net-centric [architectures], this is something that takes time to achieve at the full benefits level.
What will be the main role of the new SOA laboratory? They are looking at application development approaches that we think will be mainstream in three to four years. They will be writing a fourth-generation application in the labs where we bring together functionality that we expect to see a doctor, a pharmacy and an insurer using ... and come up with solutions to do those problems. How do I get past the data-access problems and the service-definition problems? I need a more flexible approach to data access that doesn't need to be optimized transaction by transaction. We will then use what we learn to guide the rest of Accenture.
Why did you decide to focus first on the health care industry? The costs are very high industrywide for medical services. It involves multiple independent organizations. No one company prescribes medicine, dispenses it and pays for it. We wanted an environment where there are multiple different companies with multiple different platforms that had to come together to improve this business process called prescriptions. I wanted something people could pretty quickly understand functionally. Pretty much everyone has gotten a prescription. I don't have to spend a lot of time describing what it is and how you get it.
What are some of the cultural challenges associated with this type of paradigm shift in application development? Just like the CIO is in charge of the corporate data model ... in the future, that same CIO will be in charge of the corporate process model to make sure that changes to Process X don't inadvertently negatively affect Process Y. The CIOs in all companies that move to SOA will have to bulk up on people with process knowledge. It is probably the biggest governance issue we see.