- SOA adoption is highest in Europe and lowest in Asia. There has been a
decrease in the number of organizations planning to adopt SOA next year, and a
corresponding increase in those with no plans. This shows that a significant
minority of organizations is not pursuing SOA at this time. - SOA is generally justified as a means of reducing costs. However, the impact
on costs has been significantly less than the impact on agility and speed. - Nearly 75% of all organizations implementing SOA report positive return on
investment (ROI) in less than 24 months. - Use the results of this survey to increase your understanding of the most
effective ways to use SOA in your organization. - Focus on leveraging SOA as part of your overall IT strategy.
1Expand
2008 SOA User Survey: Introduction and Survey Methodology
-
Key Findings
4Expand
Burton Group Executive Summary: Addressing SOA Fatigue
-
SOA fatigue is a result of SOA initiatives not achieving their promised
potential in the expected timeframe. -
SOA efforts work best when they are part of an overall IT transformation
initiative -
Collaborative design and reviews not only stabilize project results, they also
build a more holistic understanding of the context in which the work is being
done. -
Effective governance and enterprise architecture, combined with visionary
executive leadership, go a long way toward reducing SOA fatigue
6Expand
ZapThink :: Research - The "S" in "SOA" is Services
-
First and foremost, you should often design Services for reuse.Add Sticky Note
- Now if only we knoew how to do that?posted by whertha on 2008-03-18
-
Services have to be designed for heterogeneity. Build Services so that
there are no calls to native interfaces or platforms -
abstraction allows access to Services from multiple, simultaneous
consumers -
when we build or design Services we need to account for aggregation. Many
Services will become parts of other Services -
Services are not applications and should have limited scope
5Expand
Dell Acquires His Brother's SaaS Company For $155 Million -- SaaS -- InformationWeek
-
The deal highlights a new trend among hardware companies to offer on-demand
services for management of data, software and systems. -
a software service for managing, storing, and recovering business e-mail.
-
an online data backup andrecoveryservice for large businesses that runs about $20 per PC a

month -
software quality testing
-
application performance management
1Expand
SOA Research: Three Keys to Effective Service-oriented Architecture Governance
-
Many organizations find their adoption of service-oriented architecture (SOA)
slowed by questions about who owns the business services—and who controls them.
Companies must therefore update and extend their IT governance structures to
provide guidance for the architecture's unique needs if they are to achieve high
performance
6Expand
ZapThink :: Research - Why Big Consulting is Hurting SOA
-
First, be wary if consulting organizations point out their experience inAdd Sticky Note
the world of SOA by putting up past projects as proof of their experience.
Most, if not all, of these past projects are really JBOWS (just a bunch
of Web Services) and have no underlying mechanisms to provide agility, which is
a core benefit of SOA.- Past experience is no indicator of future outcomes? Sounds odd. Is this to say that no past project experience is better? A mind unclutered by practicsal application!posted by whertha on 2008-02-01
-
Second, many consultants are a bit too chummy with vendors. Thus,Add Sticky Note
you'll find that they implement the same vendors and technology each and every
time- SOA is an architectural style, not a product suite so what do products have to do wiuth anything? Regardless, a company's purchasing process should be able to overcome personal preference as a bias. if not that process needs repair.posted by whertha on 2008-02-01
-
The most troubling aspect of all these issues is that most organizations won'tAdd Sticky Note
understand the impact of leveraging less-than-stellar SOA consultants until it's
too late. Indeed, the full impact of the architecture is years, not months away,
and selecting the wrong technology, or getting the wrong strategic advice, won't
be obvious until it's too late. At least until the checks for the huge fees have
cleared the banks, and the consultants are on to their next project- For such companies their evolutionary fate is well described by Darwin.posted by whertha on 2008-02-01
8Expand
Integrating IT > Development Environments > Masters of Understatement
-
Improving the customer experience, making it easier to do business, reducing
operating costs -
Implemented between December 2004 and January 2006, the Personal Deposit Account
(PDA) Paper Statements project was a make-or-break initiative for a new business
architecture implemented throughout Royal Bank -
It was designed to improve the experience that the bank delivers to clients
through the innovative use of technology. -
The first test for this new architecture was to improve communications with
RBC’s personal-deposit clients, and particularly to reduce the amount of paper
they receive. -
RBC produced and mailed more than 60 million statements to personal-deposit
account customers every year -
Customers with more than one account received multiple, separate mailings.
-
Clients can choose to sign up at www.rbcroyalbank.com to receive electronic
statements -
Through an “electronic filing cabinet” capability, clients can store images of
statements and cheques in an electronic archive for up to seven years.
10Expand
Wells Fargo
-
Wells Fargo wanted to transform its Private Client Services (PCS) business fromproduct-centric to relationship-centric to help the bank deepen its relationships withits most valuable customers
-
new sales and improved customer satisfaction, and resulting in higher margins andincreased profitability for the Wells Fargo PCS business.
-
Specific examples of opportunities that could be created by this relationship-centricapproach include:•Increasing cross-sell and up-sell rates (“sell to the client’s full balance sheet”) byexposing clients to the bank’s entire range of solutions in a context-appropriate manner•Enhancing customer profiling by bankers to facilitate needs-based selling rather thanproduct-based selling•Collecting customer information once, thereby improving the customer experience byeliminating frustrating duplicate processes•Improving efficiency, which could enable the bank to grow sales without having toincrease headcount at the same pace•Building customer confidence by demonstrating a real understanding of theirsituations, and by making each meeting or Web visit more relevant and meaningful.
-
“Our banking systems were extremely complex anddisjointed,” said Baines. “Each system was built with a different technology (e.g.,COBOL, .NET, J2EE). Applications were isolated, and there was no interface toconnect most of them. In many cases, data was replicated to suit various formats orapplications. This resulted in significant inefficiencies, an inability to provide our staffwith the most productive user experience, and the lack of a comprehensive view into acustomer’s entire portfolio.”
-
“Before marching down the SOA path, we analyzed the requirements that werecompiled by the business team,” said Baines. “We then created a high level straw-manstrategy in coordination with the business. This defined the major pieces necessary toachieve the desired end. The next step was to perform a gap analysis against ourcurrent capabilities and applications. At that point, we understood what was needed,and we developed an infrastructure roadmap to get us there.”
-
“Equally important is the fact that we can connect users to more data,faster than ever before. This makes us more agile, and we can bring new capabilities tomarket rapidly.”
-
“Rather than having the value of legacy systems minimized by isolation and a lack ofaccessibility, the systems are becoming more valuable because they can be utilized bymore users for more purposes than was previously possible,”
-
PCS personnel now have consolidated access to a customer’s entire portfolio ofaccounts at the bank, including loans and current investment positions. The SOAfacilitates a number of automated business processes that assist relationship managersin identifying cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, streamline many tasks, and enablebank employees across lines of business to enter and share important customerinformation.
-
The entire infrastructure was built and launched in less than a year, and currentlysupports more than 1.5 million customers. Because it leverages existing assets, theSOA is allowing the bank to extend the usable life of its older investments by enablingsystems that had been buried in the back office to present data on demand via theWeb to personnel who can use it to make fast, smart decisions.
-
n addition to the immediate results, Wells Fargo will be able to leverage its SOA-basedinfrastructure to accelerate the introduction of new services by reusing proven softwareCustomer Case Study Wells Fargo5components.
2Expand
ZapThink :: Research - ZapThink's 2008 SOA Forecast
-
After all, agility means dealing with such changes, so if there's any time to
have SOA in place, it's now. Unfortunately, however, many organizations are
still struggling with the business case for SOA, or even worse, have made a
wrong turn or reached some kind of impasse with their SOA initiatives. For those
organizations, we do predict cancellations of SOA projects and deferments of SOA
spending, to their detriment. Because after all, their competition might very
well be leveraging SOA to be more successful during a downturn, leaving the
unsuccessful companies out in the cold. -
The second 2008 ZapThink prognostication looks at enterprise mashups and their
relationship with SOA. Our definition of an enterprise mashup is a governed,
managed composition of loosely coupled Services within the context of a rich,
collaborative, Internet-based environment. In other words, enterprise mashups
are what organizations actually do with SOA. Our prediction, then, is
that the world of enterprise mashups will come into its own in 2008, and become
what many people are calling the "killer use-case" for SOA
1Expand
Banking on SOA | InfoWorld | Analysis | 2006-07-13 | By David L. Margulius
-
The vision Certoma proposed in 2004 was a complete restructuring of how CIB did
development, centered around a core of reusable frameworks, components, and
services that each of the business units could leverage
Notation: * = Private bookmark and comment|… = Clipping [?] | … = Public highlight [?]




