A Roadmap for This Book


The successful adoption of an Enterprise SOA is based on three fundamental factors: architecture, organization, and lessons drawn from real-world experience. The IT architecture is the technical enabler for an SOA. A successful SOA adoption accelerates an enterprise by reducing the gap between strategy and process changes on one hand and supporting IT systems on the other. The IT architecture and the business organization are mutually dependent, although they both drive each other. Finally, real-world experience, in particular previous long-term IT infrastructure initiatives (both successful and unsuccessful) influence and validate many of the core concepts of SOA. Not surprisingly, this book is structured around these three factors. After we introduce the subject area in Chapters 1 to 3, Part I, Chapters 4 to 10, focuses on the architecture. Part II, Chapters 11 to 13, discusses the challenges of introducing an SOA at the level of the organization, depicting its benefits, processes, and project management. Part III, Chapters 14 to 17, provides real-life examples of successful SOA introductions.

Chapter 1, "An Enterprise IT Renovation Roadmap," identifies the need for agility and cost savings as the main drivers for the introduction of SOAs.

Chapter 2, "The Evolution of the Service Concept," describes how commercial information technology has moved toward the service concept over the last 40 years. Today's SOA is the preliminary endpoint of many years of painful "testing." Knowing and understanding previous pitfalls and mistakes help to avoid them in new projects.

Chapter 3, "Inventory of Distributed Computing Concepts," introduces the fundamental concepts of distributed computing that are required for subsequent discussions in Part I (Chapters 410). Particular topics will be communication infrastructures, synchronous versus asynchronous communication, payload semantics, granularity, and loose versus tight coupling.

Part I: Architectural Roadmap

Chapter 4, "Service-Oriented Architectures," describes the particular requirements of large organizations for building an architecture and defines the term "Service-Oriented Architecture" as it is used throughout this book.

Chapter 5, "Services as Building Blocks," is a direct continuation of Chapter 4. It introduces different service typesnamely basic, intermediary, process-centric, and external servicesand gives an in-depth discussion of their key characteristics.

Chapter 6, "The Architectural Roadmap," completes the discussion started in Chapter 5. Using the concept of building blocks, the high-level structure of SOAs is depicted. Chapter 6 introduces two key concepts: SOA layers and expansion stages. SOA layers aim to organize the aforementioned services at the enterprise level. Expansion stages are well-defined levels of maturity of an SOA that enable a stepwise implementation. In this book, three expansion stages are distinguished: fundamental SOA, networked SOA, and process-enabled SOA.

Chapter 7, "SOA and Business Process Management," shows how SOAs and BPM can complement each other in practice. This chapter draws a demarcation line between the responsibilities of a BPM infrastructure and the functional infrastructure provided by the SOA.

Chapter 8, "Process Integrity," delves into the challenges of distributed architectures with respect to consistency and how SOAs approach this major issue. This chapter provides numerous helpful, hands-on guidelines tackling real-world constraints such as heterogeneity, changing requirements, or budget.

Chapter 9, "Infrastructure of a Service Bus." By this point, the reader will know a lot about service types, the handling of business processes, and SOA layers. This chapter will address the issue of the type of runtime infrastructure that is required in order to put an SOA in placean infrastructure that is commonly known as the "service bus." Chapter 9 highlights the fact that the service bus is often heterogeneous and provides technical services such as data transport, logging, and security.

Chapter 10, "SOA in Action," discusses how SOAs apply to specific application types such as Web applications, EAI, fat clients, mobile devices, and multi-channel applications.

Part II: Organizational Roadmap

Chapter 11, "Motivation and Benefits," provides a number of important reasons as to why an organization should implement an SOA. It depicts the benefits for the organization as well as for the individual stakeholders.

Chapter 12, "The Organizational SOA Roadmap," names four pillars for the success of an SOA introduction at the enterprise levelnamely, budget, initial project, team, and buddies. This chapter deals with challenges such as conflicts of interests of different stakeholders or financing the overheads of the SOA infrastructure and gives practical advice on how to overcome these obstacles.

Chapter 13, "Project Management," provides best practices of SOA project management. Most importantly, this chapter depicts how service contracts can drive the entire development effort. It shows how different tasks can be decoupled and synchronized at the same time and how complexity and risk can be reduced. Furthermore, this chapter describes testing, configuration management, risk assessment, and estimating costs and delivery dates.

Part III: Real-World Experience

Chapter 15, "Case Study: Deutsche Post AG." The Deutsche Post World Net is a multinational group comprising three main brands and more than 275,000 employees. The SOA was set up for the Mail Corporate division at Deutsche Post, a partner to three million business customers, providing services to 39 million households through 81,000 delivery staff, 13,000 retail outlets, 3,500 delivery bases, and 140,000 letterboxes. The SOA at Deutsche Post AG covers a mainly Java-based environment. This fact indicates that a SOA can also be beneficial in homogeneous environments.

Chapter 15, "Case Study: Winterthur." Winterthur Group, a leading Swiss insurance company, has approximately 23,000 employees worldwide achieving a premium volume of 33.5 billion Swiss Francs in 2003. In 1998, Winterthur's Market Unit Switzerland developed a concept for an Application Service Platform. Since then, this integration platform, called "e-Platform," has been implemented and used as the technological basis for the realization of an SOA. Today, the SOA includes most of the mission-critical business applications. Its technical focus is on mainframe-based CORBA services. Well-organized processes and a service repository have been recognized as key success factors at Winterthur.

Chapter 16, "Case Study: Credit Suisse." Credit Suisse Group is a leading global financial services company operating in more than 50 countries with about 60,000 staff. Credit Suisse reported assets under management of 1,199 billion Swiss Francs in December 2003. The SOA was initially implemented in order to create multi-channel banking applications and online trading portals. In addition, the SOA was utilized to consolidate the core business application portfolio. Credit Suisse has implemented three different service buses in order to approach the different requirements of synchronous communication, asynchronous communication, and bulk data transfer.

Chapter 17, "Case Study: Intelligent Finance." Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBoS) is a UK Financial Services provider with divisions in Retail Banking, Insurance & Investment, Business Banking, Corporate Banking, and Treasury. HBoS is the UK's largest mortgage and savings provider with a customer base of about 22 million. Intelligent Finance was launched as a division of Halifax plc with the aim of attracting new customers from outside Halifax and specifically to target the UK clearing banks. Intelligent Finance was launched as Project Greenfield in 2000, starting an entire new banking operation from scratch, based on an SOA. Three years later, by the end of 2003, Intelligent Finance had 820,000 customer accounts, representing assets of £15.5 billion. The Intelligent Finance system was probably one of the largest and most advanced early SOA deployments in the financial services industry in Europe.



    Enterprise SOA. Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices
    Enterprise SOA: Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices
    ISBN: 0131465759
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2003
    Pages: 142

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