Section 14.4. Lessons Learned, Benefits, and Perspectives

14.4. Lessons Learned, Benefits, and Perspectives

After more than two years of successfully running its SOA and the associated service infrastructure SBB, Deutsche Post has gained much useful experience, which is summarized in the following practical advices [HBa04]:

• If you want to reduce IT complexity through integration, start with the business (logical) view and use an architectural approach.

• Focus on services (multiple use of data and functionality), not on data interchange (point-to-point communication).

• Don't neglect the integration infrastructure layerthis is much more than just "data transport."

• The technical integration infrastructure is characterized by long-term stability, so stay vendor-independent and stick to open standards.

• The success of a whole integration project mainly depends on the acceptance of all business-driven service participants. So, don't let the IT professionals drive the effort alone!

Deutsche Post managed to reduce time to market significantly. The realization of new services only takes a few days due to the integrated infrastructure. Using the SBB helps keep implementation projects manageable and lean. These projects can focus on service implementations and do not have to worry about data connectivity. Moreover, the SBB can be maintained and updated without having to modify the services themselves.

As we mentioned, there were also some challenges to overcome when introducing the SOA. In particular, the effort initially needed to convince service providers to take reusability into account in their development process was higher than expected. A mixture of persuasion, subsidies, and coercion was necessary to achieve the desired compliance with the SOA standards.

A particularly visible success story was the adoption of the service "Customer Management" in the call center application, which today provides additional functionality such as registered mail. Before this adoption, all call center contacts were manually recorded by the agents, which led to typos and data duplication. Now call center agents have direct access to customer data by simply typing in the customer identification number.

The SOA and the Service Backbone have proved to be successful at Deutsche Post and are constantly extended by involving current and potential users in the overall process.

According to [HBr03], the following extensions are planned for the next major release (SBB Release 3.0) of the Service Backbone:

• Instrumentation and service management

• Service call routing with intermediaries

• "Users and Rights" as a service participant

• Pluggable core architecture

• Support of "Process Integration" (phase 1) as a service participant

After the successful introduction of the SOA at Division Mail, a rollout at DHL is now under way. In doing so, Deutsche Post will reuse the basic methodology and the Service Backbone developed already. A special team will be set up at DHL that will be responsible for integration and consolidation. This team will be supported by the IT strategy team at Division Mail. The decision to extend the SOA to DHL is also a sign of the positive perception of the SOA at the level of Deutsche Post's top management.

References

[HBa04] Herr, Michael and Uwe Bath . SBB Motivation Paper: The business-oriented background of Service Backbone. http://www.servicebackbone.org/, January 2004.

[HBr03] Herr, Michael and Stefan Brombach . SBB Management Paper: Benefits and application range. http://www.servicebackbone.org/. September 2003.

[HS03] Herr, Michael and Ursula Sannemann . SBB Technical Paper: The Architecture of Service Backbone. http://www.servicebackbone.org/. October 2003.

[Sc02] Schulze, Jan . Geschäftsprozesse bestimmen die Architektur: EAI senkt IT-Risiko der Post, Computerwoche No. 28 of July 12, 2002, http://www.computerwoche.de.

Links

http://www.computerwoche.de

http://www.servicebackbone.org

http://www.wsi.org