The British Energy Group, which is responsible for
generating more than 20% of the nation's electricity, is to adopt a
service oriented architecture (SOA) to help it adapt its IT
infrastructure to rapid changes in the energy market.
The project will help the group's electricity division, British
Energy Power and Trading (Bepet), respond to market changes,
including the deregulation of European markets, mergers and
acquisitions, and automated billing.
"In light of these changes, an audit of our IT landscape
revealed that we had a number of disparate applications lacking
strategic business alignment," said Jeremy Lock, IT manager at
Bepet.
"Because we run a combination of real-time and financial market
trading systems, it was essential that we made these systems more
agile to respond to the changing market environment."
The roll-out will allow Bepet to define common business
processes such as validating a user name and password, and develop
them into services that can be reused across all software
applications.
The project requires the organisation to review 60 IT trading
applications and break them down into 300 categories of business
processes that can be reused in future systems.
"By adopting an SOA-style approach to developing future systems,
we now aim to have more formalised business service planning," said
Lock.
The challenge for deploying a SOA is in preparing the enterprise
for change and is not solely about IT, said Sohel Aziz, Europe
practice head, of technology consulting at Infosys, who is advising
on the project.
"SOA does not come with a vendor product, it is an architectural
strategy that impacts that way business solutions are developed.
Only 30% of SOA is about the development process, the remainder is
about governance and management, both pre-development and
operations," he said.
Analyst firm Gartner, predicts that by 2008, SOA will provide
the basis for 80 percent of new IT project development projects
Gartner analyst, John Radcliffe, said organisations should start
planning how to rebalance their existing application portfolio to
include processes based on SOA.
By 2008, the research firm predicts that the drive to support
business process automation will be the primary adoption driver for
SOA.
SOA toolbox
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