Whether it is SOA, BPM, or EDI, solving integration
challenges is more about rigorous business management than the
latest technology.
More than most industries, the technology market thrives on
acronyms and buzzwords. Visit the office of any of the Fortune
500's top IT decision-makers and you are sure to hear about the
power of
service-orientated architecture (SOA) or the promise of
business process management (BPM). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the
excited explanations are not coming from the IT team but from
visiting sales teams pitching the latest must-have technology that
will seamlessly solve all business challenges without a day of
disruption.
Despite all the attention on new capabilities, the reality is
most businesses spend just 2% to 5% of their IT budget on new
technology. That means more than 95% of IT resources are focused on
keeping the business running and extracting more value from the
existing systems. Given that fact, the key to achieving business
agility cannot be found in new technology alone. What is required
is a shift in thinking that utilises technology constructs like SOA
not as technology road maps but as a higher-level method for
defining, organising and connecting business processes.
SOA is a practical and powerful concept, but it existed long
before the advent of Web services. Indeed, many of the elements of
SOA - such as service contracts, service abstraction, service
compose-ability and so on - can be seen in ADP's first payroll
service introduced in 1949. Fundamentally, it does not require the
adoption of any particular technology for its benefits to be
realised. When you truly break down the hype behind the latest
technology promises, the challenges faced by businesses never
really change. Businesses have always needed to share information
with customers and partners in a timely manner. They have always
needed to manage internal information and ensure the security of
sensitive data. What does change is the sophistication of the
technology available to address these challenges.
With the recent focus on service oriented architecture, many
organisations are realising that successful technology
implementations should start with a thorough review of business
processes and objectives rather than an inventory of technology
systems. Businesses can often rely on much of their existing
technology combined to work together in new ways. From there, they
can invest their 2% to 5% of their IT budget in new integration
technology that works across existing systems, protocols and
standards.
A great example of using SOA to get a handle on the overall
business can be found in ViewSonic, the flat-screen monitor
company. ViewSonic competes in a highly commoditised global market
with ever-shrinking margins and pressure to constantly wring more
efficiency out of a lean system. To stay competitive, ViewSonic
sets out to provide its customers with maximum flexibility when
they placed, checked, or changed orders. By becoming "the company
easy to do business with", ViewSonic hoped to drive down costs and
create sustainable revenue streams.
Although the goal was simple, achieving it was complex.
ViewSonic processes more than 1.5 million transactions each year,
sources various products from hundreds of different suppliers from
multiple locations around the world and delivers their finished
products to countless retailers and channel partners. In
considering the size and scope of this environment, ViewSonic
wanted to achieve the flexibility and benefits of an SOA design
approach but also knew there was no practical way to select a
single technology (or even a small number of technologies) that
could be used across this large and diverse community of suppliers
and customers. Viewing SOA more as a design philosophy than a
technology choice, ViewSonic was able to quickly develop a flexible
and effective system that implemented a true multi-enterprise SOA
and continued to use the full range of technologies - EDI, XML,
HTTP, FTP, SMTP, Web services, application-specific interfaces and
others - that were already in use by their suppliers, customers and
internal systems.
The SOA initiative achieved return on investment in 12 months
and it allowed the company to open a new distribution channel
representing tens of millions of dollars in new business. With new
processes in place, ViewSonic can now provide their customers with
the flexibility required to stay competitive and increase market
share. And by focusing on the business process rather than the
specific technology, ViewSonic found it was able to define simple
and practical ways to solve its business challenges and turn its IT
investment into a business driver for the company.
The same can be applied to many other technologies -
technologies such as SOA, BPM and EAI are more closely related than
it might initially appear, with most being complementary or even
interchangeable. By focusing on how old and new IT concepts can be
applied to existing technologies and integrated via tools that
tolerate diversity of technology rather than attempting to
stipulate a single choice of technology, IT managers are driving
significant business results at very moderate costs.
Chris Johnson is vice-president of product management at
Sterling Commerce