Despite high initial start-up costs, service-oriented
architecture
(
SOA) centres of excellence can save organisations a significant
amount of money in the longer term and are crucial to ensure
service quality, consistency and reuse.
According to analyst Gartner, creating such centres enables
enterprises to save an average of 30% in time and expenditure on
application integration and data interface development, and cut
maintenance outlay by 20%. It can also help them to ensure
component reuse levels of about 25%.
But although about 60% of medium-sized and large companies with
a turnover of more than £25m have set up some form of centre of
excellence, they may not necessarily call it that. Other terms
include competency centre, SOA steering committee, central
architecture team or project management office.
Less mature organisations may have introduced more informal
arrangements instead, creating virtual teams of senior architects
and designers who are involved in each
SOA project as just one element of their role.
The common theme here is building a group of individuals to
become a source of best practice, advice and guidance to ensure the
wheel does not have to be reinvented each time a new SOA project is
introduced.
An organisation is unlikely to create a centre of excellence to
handle its first SOA initiative, but once it moves to its third or
fourth, such a notion begins to make sense.
Growing ambitions
Neil Macehiter, a partner at analyst Macehiter Ward-Dutton, says
the issue of when to introduce such a centre tends to be one of
scope. "As the scale of the organisation and its ambitions grow,
the benefit of a centre is that it can provide centralised guidance
in terms of architecture and technical standards, which helps
reduce cost and increase value and quality," he says.
So rather than using three different technologies in five
different ways across 15 projects, it becomes possible to introduce
and enforce a common, consistent, best-practice approach across
them all and to manage any deviations from the standard on an
exception basis.
This technique not only makes it easier to understand where and
why such exceptions occur, it also means personnel do not
repeatedly have to go through learning processes that have already
been captured elsewhere.
But Ian Finley, a research director at AMR Research, says that
although many companies decide to adopt an
SOA approach because of the perceived benefits of service
re-use, such a situation does not happen spontaneously and has to
be planned for.
"To build an architecture rather than just a collection of web
services, you need people to sit down and think about what services
the business requires, how to build them generically across
different situations and how to maintain and deliver them," he
says. "It's about discipline and being able to leverage new ideas
without people making the same mistake 20 times in 20 different
places."
Key challenge
A key challenge is being able to articulate the value in
creating such a centre in order to obtain funding for it. The
problem is that although centres of excellence require upfront
investment, not least in terms of skilled resource, it is
notoriously difficult to sell such IT-focused initiatives to the
business because they are generally considered to be an overhead.
This is particularly true when benefits can seem intangible and a
return on investment may not be evident for between 18 months to
two years because of the learning curve involved.
As a result, says Paolo Malinverno, a research vice-president at
Gartner, many organisations initially undertake a couple of
projects to demonstrate that
SOA works and, in the process, build up an informal group of
architectural and design experts by factoring the costs into any
initiatives.
"It's a tough sell, so, typically, people don't just go to a
business manager and say they'd like a centre of excellence," he
says. "Most are almost introduced by the back door. It's about
gradually proving the value and pointing out that this can either
be done in a systematic or a piecemeal way, but the latter will be
more expensive."
Such a strategy involves introducing metrics to measure before,
after and ongoing improvements in service, but can also be
quantified in terms of staff requiring less time to get up to speed
and/or of reducing initial design costs.
Customer care
But Macehiter says it can also be valuable to point to other
centres of excellence in the organisation, which are generally
involved in activities such as customer care or pricing.
"There will be other organisational units that set out to ensure
consistency across the business and if people question why they
should invest, you can say for the same reason that you invest in a
centralised customer service team - to co-ordinate activity and
centralise information," he explains.
One organisation that has successfully gone down the SOA centre
of excellence route is the
Standard Life Group, which provides life assurance, pensions,
investment management and healthcare insurance.
The company first set up a so-called "hub-centric" integration
centre in 1998 when the decision was made to unify its architecture
and provide a standardised framework for the application
development team in order to introduce consistency and promote
component re-use. The move involved selecting appropriate
middleware and selling the vision to the developer community,
before introducing 10 infrastructure projects under the new
model.
But by 2001 it became clear that to adopt an SOA approach, it
would be necessary to make changes at the technology, people and
process level to introduce tighter governance and be able to
analyse and manage business service impacts more closely.
Command platform
As part of this process, the centre of excellence, which acts as
a shared service, re-factored its framework, which was based on
IBM's WebSphere application server, and introduced a Command
platform. The platform includes governance and lifecycle management
tools, development templates and utilities to facilitate the
development process and is updated continually to support new
technologies. To date, it has been subject to about 70 person-years
of new development and maintenance.
Also, business services, of which there are now about 500, were
put into a catalogue or runtime registry to make them easier to
find and re-use and a logging mechanism was included to dynamically
track which services were being re-employed where and how.
Ian Muir, chief architect at Standard Life, says: "It is a
multi-year transition to this architecture and you have to invest
in it. These days, you can buy technology off the shelf, but it
will still take six to 12 months to get a framework implemented
properly and used consistently. After that, it's about building on
top of it and investing in how you want to run it. So to get a
payback in return-on-investment terms, you're really looking at a
two to three-year timeframe."
To encourage consistent usage of the framework requires a
multi-pronged approach, however. In Standard Life's case, this
involved ensuring that the 10 members of the SOA centre of
excellence developed strong relationships with
SOA advocates in the development teams, which use Agile
methods. Advocates are lead developers who guide their teams in the
use of the framework and feed back requirements and ideas to the
centre.
Build relationships
But even this is not enough in itself, says Joe Philips, chief
architect for the company's SOA centre. "You have to ensure staff
build relationships with the right people, but they also have to
have the authority to sell the product. It can't be a paper
deliverable - it has to be a concrete architecture, design and
underlying software framework." But this framework, in turn, must
be neither too proscriptive nor too general, he adds.
"You want to promote architectural consistency, but not define
how to develop each application for the next 10 years, so there's a
skill in pitching it correctly," says Philips. Standard Life, for
example, focuses on ensuring "architectural rigour" around the
creation of back-end re-usable business services, but gives
developers and their business customers control over which
front-end user interface they want to employ.
Another important consideration is being able to answer the
"what's in it for me?" question to ensure that individual
developers are engaged. "We took the approach that a carrot is
better than a stick, and so we offer developers tools and automate
processes to help them in their day-to-day work," says Philips.
"This means they don't have to focus on how things knit together,
but can concentrate on building solutions to help the business do
what it wants to do."
And the relationship-building activities do not end there,
either. The SOA centre team also works alongside a business service
management centre of excellence, which is "effectively a virtual
police force that ensures quality of service in the catalogue",
says Muir. "It's not a full-time team, but is made up of
line-of-business people who ensure everyone is working in the same
way to the same standards."
Creating flexibility
Such an approach not only ensures consistency across all the
teams, but also means staff can be moved to "where the business
demand is, which has the great advantage of creating flexibility of
resource", says Muir. Other advantages include business service
re-use levels that currently run at about 53%.
But again, it is not enough to simply set up such structures and
leave people to get on with it. It is necessary to "constantly sell
the benefits to both developers and the business", he adds.
Despite the complexity and effort involved in such activities,
not going down this route constantly leads back to the issue of
what would work as an alternative, Muir observes.
"Although there is an upfront cost involved, ultimately it has
proved cheaper and faster to do it. The question is, where is the
crossover point and at what stage does not having a centre of
excellence start to hurt you because things aren't flexible enough?
That really depends on the complexity of the organisation, but once
you get to a certain size, I'd have said it was essential."