Arecent survey of CEOs found their
No. 1 objective is growth, followed
closely by margin. In order to secure this growth, companies have to deal not only
with the opportunity side but also with constraints of existing IT systems.
“Seventy percent of the CEOs cited IT as a
key to growth, but 60 percent of those same
executives said that IT is inhibiting growth,”
says Bill Russell, executive vice president of
Allegient in Indianapolis. “That’s because the
existing systems and architecture do not
have the flexibility to become agile and
poised for speed or to drive customer value.”
Smart Business spoke to Russell about the
shortcomings of legacy-based platforms and
how companies are successfully “wrapping”
these older systems with services-oriented
architecture (SOA) to extract maximum
speed and value as they modernize for their
growth initiatives.
What symptoms indicate shortcomings with
legacy-based platforms?
The main symptom occurs when you’re
not meeting the new business solution time-lines. In other words, the legacy platforms
actually become an inhibitor. The second
symptom arises when a larger and larger
share of your IT budget is going to maintenance because there’s a cost side to keeping
those big, monolithic transaction systems
running. Finally, companies are finding
themselves stretched because the resident
subject matter expertise is getting smaller
and smaller. You’re probably dealing with an
extraordinary retirement curve because
most of the people who grew up supporting
these systems are boomers with 15 to 20
years in, and they’re coming up on retirement. So where are you going to find support
for these legacy systems?
What is the timeline for the end of legacy-based platforms?
I don’t know if we can talk about the end of
these systems, but these systems as we know
them today are probably going to have to
change significantly within the next five or
seven years due to their lack of flexibility, the
boomer retirements and the absence of
skilled resources to keep them optimized.
Why are there so many definitions for SOA?
There are so many definitions because SOA
is a lot of things. It’s a strategy, it represents
an organizational model, it represents a management discipline or method, it is an architectural approach to computing, and, finally,
it is a technology platform with a set of technological capabilities. I define SOA as a new
kind of a distributed, modular computing
model that’s going to be utilized to become
more agile, to speed up the applications that
can be built, a way to reuse IT assets at a
lower cost and a way to modernize against
some of the older, existing platforms.
How are companies successfully transitioning into SOA platforms?
Companies are using SOA as part of their
modernization strategy. The fastest way to
do this is to look at a business problem and
see whether the way to solve that business
problem, if you’re going to use technology,
is through a services-based approach. The
emerging standards allow you to abstract
parts of applications and/or parts of data
services that can be published and consumed by other applications. This concept
of composite applications means you can use a set of these published services,
stored in a repository, to build a new composite application — and you can do it
faster and cheaper. SOA also is being utilized as ‘wrappers’ for older legacy systems. You’ve probably heard, ‘We’re wrapping our legacy application in order to
deploy it or utilize it as a service,’ or, ‘We’re
wrapping a part of our legacy application
or our legacy database and exposing it as a
service to be utilized.’
What are the soft spots of SOA?
The fact is that some of the service standards are still firming. But major players
like IBM, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard
are providing major horsepower behind
the standards movement. The platforms to
manage or govern the services you build
inside your enterprise are also immature.
The ultimate vision is that these services
will be published outside your company
for use by other organizations. This is still
risky because federated security models
are not as widely deployed as they will be,
and outside-the-firewall services-based
architecture is probably the most complex.
How is SOA architecture altering traditional
business models and roles?
SOA is a new architecture, a new strategy
and a new organizational model. It is
changing many aspects of the IT and business world as they go toward this culture
of agility and reusability. There will be new
roles and new skills from both the business
contribution and the technology side.
Emerging business roles, like content
developers, business rule developers,
process modelers and scenario developers,
will collaborate with the new technology
roles, including composite application
architects, service developers and service
assemblers. When combined, this all new,
collaborative SOA framework will deliver
faster and better business value.
BILL RUSSELL is executive vice president of Allegient in Indianapolis. Reach him at (317) 564-5701 or [email protected].