Standard Lifeis pushing the use of
aservice oriented architecture (SOA)to
the heart of its IT strategy as it seeks to share information more
effectively across the company and to make its business processes
more effficient.
Standard Life's IT director, Keith Young, said that its use of
SOA will be key in helping the company reach its financial targets.
It has been especially
useful since Standard Life floated as a public company in
2006.
Balancing the need to produce strong financial results in the
short term with the need to invest in new applications to remain
competitive places the
SOA concept at the centre of Standard Life's IT strategy, he
said.
"As a PLC, there is a focus on producing short term results, but
IT continues to be a long term business investment for the
company," said Young.
The SOA approach to software design promotes modularity,
allowing organisations to develop new software applications of
separate parts or existing pieces of software code.
Young said that reusing common software code in modernising and
replacing older applications has saved it approximately £16m over
the cost of developing programs from scratch.
The company is using SOA to build a customer database
application, to replace the legacy system it inherited from Prime
Health Ltd (now known as Standard Life health), which the group
took over in 2000. It expects to complete the project later this
year.
"We are currently re-writing a completely new application to
replace the one we acquired in the Prime Health acquisition using
Java and DB2. We are using SOA to ensure the application can
fit with our group systems - to share customer information between
groups better and over different platforms," he said.
This approach means that Standard Life is not building separate
applications for different channels, which could be expensive. It
can quickly extend the service to new channels, such as mobile
phones, if customers demand it, improving the insurer's time to
market over its competition.
"A customer will have access to the same business service
whether they are using interactive voice response through the
telephone, or whether they use the internet," said Young.
"It also ensures consistency. The customer gets the same
information, the same experience, whatever channel they use to
communicate through," he said.
Standard Life now has a catalogue of 470 business modules it can
deploy. When the time comes to build a new application, the first
development step is for programmers to look through the catalogue
of its existing services and use what is already there, said
Young.
Although the financial services industry as a whole is making
progress in developing best practices for implementing SOA, serious
challenges remain. Promoting a culture which designs new
applications through code reuse first is the main one, said
Gartner.
Box: What makes a mature SOA deployment
More-mature SOA adopters are firms that have more than 25% of
current applications based on SOA and design new applications so
that they can be offered as a service and/or included as a
component of another application, a 2008 Gartner report said.
Less-mature SOA adopters are firms that only update their legacy
applications with Web services and do not make a conscious effort
to build a library of services from the new applications they
design.
Source: Gartner.