Repository: Shopping for Services

A related governance step for SOA is to create a repository for the components developed so that you can track and control usage. The FDIC has been using a repository for its pre-SOA software components, so Bartell and his FFIEC colleagues know the value of such a system for IT governance. But they also know they don’t yet understand what capabilities a repository will need in the new SOA world. "We haven’t filled in the plan, but when we get more mature, we’ll build that repository," he says.

At Hygeia, a health-care transaction service provider, CIO Rod Hamilton has begun using wikis, the editable online bulletin boards, to help developers and business analysts track the services available. (The company earned CIO 100 honors for its efforts to create standard, reusable services for its key business processes, such as user validation, document routing and workflow management.) Each wiki contains information on one or more services, which IT and business staff can all easily see and modify, with changes automatically tracked. It’s a quick-and-dirty approach, similar to using Excel for rudimentary databases, but this simple technology works because his organization is small—with a total IT staff of 15. Hamilton knows he’ll need a repository as Hygeia develops more and more common services to implement the standard business processes that handle client transaction data in its multiple forms, as well as for specialty services that handle unique client needs.

For all these CIO 100 honorees, the focus on architectural and development rigor is critical: "For successful SOA, 80 percent of the effort is changing the way your organization manages the process of the application development lifecycle," notes Dennis Gaughan, research director for IT governance and SOA at AMR Research.

Data and Security Matter

Data management is another key governance issue in SOA. It’s important to capture and communicate a standardized context for shared data across the organization so that the data is used as intended. Data integrity and consistency are critical for CIO 100 honoree KnowledgeBase Marketing, since its business is about managing, merging, filtering and qualifying customer lists. KnowledgeBase has multiple systems for handling data inside the company, and they all perform the same basic functions—data cleansing, list management, consumer matching and data analysis—in slightly different ways, which prevents the company from efficiently combining and analyzing different marketing data for each client’s specific project needs. So, in a CIO 100–winning project, the company has replaced the multiple data-cleansing systems with a single core service delivered through an SOA. Now, every business department applies the same cleansing service to all consumer data, ensuring consistent results. And the service orientation means that as the company develops other cleansing, management, matching and analysis functions, all business departments will get consistent results in what they deliver to clients (who may work with more than one business department), says Brian Camp, senior VP of infrastructure.