IT departments implementing SOA will need people who truly understand the business.
While lots of hot new technologies take years of hard work to deliver on their promise, that's not true for SOA. Once up to speed on the technology, an IT staff can churn out dozens of useful services. Part of SOA's value is that it doesn't take six months to design a Web service and implement it, only to discover a design flaw that requires a major fix. As IT gets more familiar with services, the way it applies them is likely to shift toward uses that are sophisticated, complex and business-changing.

Still, many CIOs stress patience in implementing SOA. Stuart Johnson, general manager for integration and service-oriented architecture at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, says that when the bank began building services in 2002 and 2003, his staff quickly got up to speed on "atomic" Web services—services that perform a single function. These proved the concept and the developers quickly started to push for building complicated composite services that would combine many services, but Johnson held off.

"I wanted to keep the technology as simple as possible. SOA is already the next buzzword, but a huge SOA architecture will make it difficult to build anything," Johnson says. He wanted to make sure the bank understood how to manage SOA.

Commonwealth Bank links technical and business analysts together to develop new products, and many of them were pushing to use services to expose more data online to customers and to partners on the Bank's back-end systems. Johnson was leery at first, due to data security issues. Also, the bank is in the midst of a major systems initiative it calls CommSee, which now has close to 2,000 separate services. So before he started with SOA, Johnson spent time with Microsoft discussing SOA frameworks. It wasn't until 2004, after almost a year of working with the services concept, that the bank started to build the first of what it calls "orchestrated" services, in which it used a series of services working in concert.

The bank's first orchestrated service was designed to help customers open a direct-deposit account. Opening an account requires a series of steps that can take as long as six weeks, and Johnson says the bank may access up to 40 different data sources. Commonwealth Bank used SOA to see if the customer had filed appropriate documents (to verify identity, for instance), to make sure there was money in a checking account before a checkbook was issued, and to issue a bank card.

Initially, the bank designed the system to kick it back to the customer if there was an application error. As the system rolled out to more branches, that became vexing to customers, and Johnson's group built services to make the system handle it. "It would've been difficult to do from day one," Johnson says.

Like many IT managers, Johnson knows there simply aren't enough technology types who truly understand the business side, so many of his developers focus on business rules and specifications. Other IT organizations have done things like split into groups that are attached to their business functions, to make sure the services match business needs.

Railinc, for instance, is moving toward creating a committee of business and technology managers to help it set priorities on which services to build. The company has more than 60 services in use, but is only now developing a service to handle all its e-mail notifications, which it sends out in multiple formats.

Commonwealth Bank's Johnson says the technology was "quite painful" at first, in part because he was building basic elements of his infrastructure that will soon be built into vendor offerings like Microsoft's Web services platform, Indigo. He is cautious about over-blowing the impact of SOA at his company, especially since the firm has gone through a huge technology upgrade and an internal reorganization. But the service architecture is clearly valuable, and he says he's looking forward to SOA "becoming a commodity."

What are the first steps we should take toward SOA?

How will SOA change the company's entire infrastructure?

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