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GCN Home > 03/20/06 issue

Mixing the menu

Service-oriented architectures can tie disparate programs together to share data and change the way agencies work

By S. Michael Gallagher, Special to GCN

If there were ever a technology that seemed tailored to the needs of government, it’s service-oriented architecture. With thousands of disparate systems needing to share information across organizational boundaries—particularly homeland security information—SOA offers agencies an attractive shortcut to their data-sharing goals.

SOA is a method by which organizations can share the data within (and the business logic of) their applications with other applications, either within the same organization or across divisions, by publishing them as Web services. Because these services can use the same protocol used by Web applications (HTTP or Secure HTTP), they can also be configured for use behind the firewall or across firewalls.

Because it uses a standard set of protocols, defined by organizations such as the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (Oasis) and the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), SOA can be used to tie together the functionality and data from widely disparate applications. Agencies can use tools from a number of software companies to connect Web services to nearly any existing information system, including mainframe “green-screen” applications. Market analysts at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn., estimate that by 2008, 80 percent of all new software projects will be based on SOA.

The Defense Department, through its Defense Information Systems Agency, has begun to move forward with a significant cross-service SOA, Net-Centric Enterprise Services. NCES is part of DOD’s Global Information Grid effort, and will, as DISA describes it, “empower the edge user to pull information from any available source, with minimal latency, to support the mission.”

Data as driver

“There are many different drivers in the federal government for SOA,” said Ian Bruce, director of marketing of Systinet Corp., an SOA management tools vendor whose products are being used in the NCES effort by integrator Merlin Technical Solutions Inc. of Greenwood Village, Colo. Systinet recently merged with Mercury Interactive Corp. of Mountain View, Calif.

“The primary driver is information sharing,” Bruce said. “After 9/11, there was a lot of introspection about what we could do better. With NCES’ net-centric data strategy, we have the ability to make data visible [to everyone who needs it], and have everyone at the edge pull instead of having data pushed to a select few.”

Fulfilling that goal requires the reliability, security and flexibility to connect to a wide range of data sources and clients. In many respects NCES is the perfect fit for an SOA.

More news on related topics: Enterprise Architecture



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