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Move to SOA can be rewarding for companies, users say

30.01.2007
For many companies, the move to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) can yield substantial rewards, including reduced operating costs and better customer service. But those benefits only show up after companies work through thorny problems like obtaining executive buy-in, shifting the way development groups operate and hammering out sometimes contentious new business rules, according to users at The Open Group's Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in San Diego.

At Marriott International Inc., for example, SOA has been identified as one of the corporation's three strategic technology platforms, along with business intelligence and commercial off-the-shelf software, said John Whitridge, Marriott's vice president of enterprise architecture. The Bethesda, Md.-based company has tapped SOA to help shorten development times and pull more value from legacy systems.

"One of the primary benefits of SOA is to get our solutions to market faster and anticipate and respond to competitive threats quicker," Whitridge said. "We're not taking SOA as a rip-and-replace strategy. We're trying to figure out how to use what we have and enhance it."

To that end, Marriott is working to mitigate some of the challenges a move toward an SOA can bring, he said. Last year, the company revived its enterprise architecture group -- which had dissolved because it was only staffed with employees dedicated to it part time -- to lead the SOA effort, Whitridge said. The company's enterprise architecture team linked the benefits of an SOA to Marriott's corporate strategies of becoming more agile and growing.

The group also designed a "maturity model," essentially a road map that outlines the principles and guidelines for an SOA plan and highlights some of the incremental benefits expected along the way. "It is very easy for IT people to say, 'Give me money and you will get benefits,'" Whitridge said. "[But] if you are doing cost avoidance ... how do you show you are 50% cheaper? Make the SOA journey be something the business buys into."

Con-way Inc., a freight transportation and logistics company, has seen substantial ROI from its SOA, which it has been building out since 1998, said Maja Tibbling, lead enterprise architect at the San Mateo, Calif.-based company. For example, she said, the company can change a business process on the fly as soon as an alteration is needed because the IT department can modify the orchestration of the services that make up a process instead of rewriting code, she said. (See .)