Agile, Agile, Agile - You Path to Agile SOA - Part 5 (final)
Your Guide Along the SOA Adoption Path
I’ve been talking about Agile SOA, which is an iterative method of working with the business and IT to develop services that better serve the business. In other words, using our methodology, you’re building an optimized business with assets you already own! Not all at once – not over night…very much via releases over time. This is powerful.
So let’s talk about how some customers have implemented our methodology and software.
You can see in the figure that we recommend implementing services in iterations.
Real World Examples
We’re going to take a look at some real world examples now.
Bombay Stock Exchange
Legacy Modernization
First, let’s talk about a Periscope example. The Bombay Stock Exchange uses Periscope. They have a lot of data on Stratus platforms. They wanted to do ad-hoc reporting on that data. But there weren’t tools like Cognos, Brio, etc. that work on those platforms. Periscope makes the Stratus data appear in an Oracle database – as if it’s Oracle data. So any tool that can access Oracle can report on the Stratus data. This simplifies life for the exchange.
Exchange:
– Stratus system – high uptime requirements
– Ad hoc reporting through Periscope
– Simplifies access and control/auditing
IntelliReal
B2B Integration
One of our customers is in the real estate intelligence business. We created a number of services around existing business logic and data. The services were initially used to develop a UI that was used by most of their customers. When customers asked for customization of the UI, our customer would offer that everything they saw in UI was simply a service that they could use as they saw fit. The B2B customers would then use the exact same services to develop their own user interfaces, workflow processes or integrate applications. What you see here are examples of how different companies used the exact same data.
The beauty of building services was that we could use our own services for the UI.
In this first figure, you can see that this is from the IntelliReal site. Enter an address and pick your report type. This call the respective service that often generates a PDF and other times returns data.
After entering an address and requesting a detailed online report, the user can see a list of objects that exist for this property.
The following figure is a PDF that gets generated when a user requests an Intelligent Property Report. One service returns the data for this PDF and another service formats the data and generates a PDF. This way customers can call the data service if they wish to generate a similar report in a different format.
And this figure shows the geosearch functionality. Via Google Maps all of the homes in a neighborhood are displayed and then can be slice and diced as the user sees fit. For example, the user can see the data by the number of bedrooms in a home or the style of home, acreage and the like.
And this figure shows the geosearch functionality. Via Google Maps all of the homes in a neighborhood are displayed and then can be slice and diced as the user sees fit. For example, the user can see the data by the number of bedrooms in a home or the style of home, acreage and the like.
The figures below all represent ways that different customers used the same data as above. They similar call the same services that IntelliReal uses internally and then they graph the data however they choose. For example, you can see that this page shows a simple Google map for a property and a few details about the property.
Another vendor had their own mapping package to display the data on a map. You can see they displayed an index, range for the property value and so forth.
As I mentioned above, IntelliReal displayed the market volatility data in a heat map. This customer wanted to graph the data for a specific property and then to put it into a table at the bottom.
Financial Markets
One View of the Customer, Real Time Updates and Basel II
The financial markets are a great example of a business that requires SOA to comply with federal regulations. I think of Basel II as the SOX of the banking world. One of the Basel II requirements is that a bank be capable of pulling together everything about a customer within one minute. In other words, a 360 degree view of a customer. We all know that we have customer data in a number of systems throughout our organizations. Above you can see that this financial institution has a number of databases and data warehouses.
Using iPerspective and our Agile SOA methodology a company can quickly pull this information together from any number of systems. This also provides for a big payoff when the business changes – such as a new acquisition. Having a service architecture in place will reduce the complexity for these institutions.
Some of the SOA Winners include Wells Fargo, Capital One and JP Morgan Chase.
Non-SOA losers: Citibank, Wachovia, WAMU
Healthcare Illustration of Value
Healthcare is an industry that’s screaming for a service oriented architecture. For example, healthcare facilities are spending millions of dollars in EMR (Electronic Medical Record) systems in order to ultimately save hundreds of millions of dollars. However, there’s a gap in the plan. Only 4% of doctors say they will use the EMR. Why? They say things like “it takes too much time, it’s too hard to use, how does it benefit them?” By working with the doctors to discover their needs and preferences, we can increase the use of EMR, helping hospitals realize their planned savings! Again, our iterative Agile approach is key.
In other words, bringing Electronic Medical Records systems together with other hospital systems provides a huge value to the physicians and nurses. Specifically the business intelligence can be used to drive down cost and improve quality. The CRM data can be used to track insurance and treatments. Other items such as reimbursements and care tracking from start to finish, clinical decision support, inter-organizational system integration, telemedicine for rural healthcare, support for medical tourism and transient patients and integrated care are additional benefits.
Roadmap: Global Services Utility Provider
Another example of how a company might use iPerspective is in the cloud computing world. iPerspective allows you to expose your data and business logic as services. Cloud computing allows you to run your own software on someone else’s hardware. In other words it combines SaaS and HaaS. You can’t do cloud computing without SOA. The advantages of cloud computing are listed here…they are numerous – lowering overhead, you can expense the cost rather than having to capitalize it (i.e. you can write off 100% this year rather than 20%), you have access to your systems throughout the world, it simplifies outsourcing globally too, it’s very flexible, you can turn servers on and off at the bat of an eye and you can get a lot of scaling and redundancy by distributing your servers.
Illustration of the BeTteR process
We’re working in a number of verticals. We have demos geared at specific verticals. So we would love to show you our Agile SOA process around the demo in your industry. We can give you a great illustration of our BeTteR process. In 5 minutes or less, we’ll show you we can not only create a set of secure services, but consume them. We like to show off the consumption using Oracle’s Application Express, but we also have demos using other consumption or mashup technologies. You’ll see how you’ll be able to create buy-in from your line of business managers – very quickly. After all – it’s all about serving the needs of the business – as quickly as possible!
In minutes, create a service to securely access a database
· Resources for projects – who is/will be certified inside your company
· Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design (LEED)
· Show the result of that service in an Oracle Application Express application
Create buy-in from your Line-of-Business Managers!
· Revise quickly to fit the business needs
· Example: want to add data from one of your preferred contractors?
· Influencing people to change by showing them immediate value
· Transform your organization to be service-oriented!
Summary
The bottom line is that by using our Agile SOA methodologies and technology, you’ll be able to deliver results faster and more inline with the business requirements. Our BeTteR process is an iterative SOA process. The end result for you and your business is that this all results in quick wins as a result of quick turnaround, which in the end is recession proof. Like in the book “Who Moved My Cheese” – when the customers change, you need to look for cheese in a new location. In other words, the business needs to be able to respond quickly. The faster you’re able to move and experiment, the better off you’ll be. As they say in the baseball world, the more “at bats” you get, the more runs you’ll have – even with a batting average of 300.
· BeTter is better…
· Quick results = quick wins = recession proof
Credit
Thanks to Hubert Smits, Agile instructor for Rally Software for the Agile graphics
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