Financial services company Standard Life has saved £2m over
the past three years by fine-tuning its software development to
allow it to re-use functionality.
The company has been looking at re-usability for the past 10 years.
In 1997 it began building connectors that would allow applications
to link to its IMS and DB/2 mainframe databases. Now it has
re-usable business services based on a software architecture that
allows it to offer new services based around proven IT
components.
Standard Life is driving 40% of its entire IT workload - about 1.6
million transactions a day - through its service-oriented
architecture, which it calls the "hub-centric
infrastructure".
Derek Ireland, application design manager at Standard Life, said
his teams have been able to provision re-usable business-level or
coarse-grain services.
About 250 such services have been rolled out to cover new business
processing, providing claims, customer and debit card data and
access to third-party services such as money laundering checks. The
architecture is built using XML and web services.
Standard Life identified two types of service-oriented application:
one that worked on the concept of a publish and subscribe model and
another which used a request reply model. It generated design
patterns and best practices for these applications, allowing
developers to deploy the patterns in their re-usable
components.
Standard Life also set up a business service catalogue, which lists
all services its developers can re-use to build applications,
managed by a team of software engineers who promote re-use
throughout the business.
The architecture has improved the quality and manageability of
in-house applications. Ian Muir, Standard Life's senior manager for
core technology, said, "We are building applications on a proven
framework."
This framework separates coding from the underlying software,
allowing for the introduction of changes, such as a new version of
Java 2.0 Enterprise Edition or IBM Websphere, in a controlled
manner. The framework allows different software versions to be run,
avoiding widescale upgrades.