Government Computer News
Piecemeal SOA
Agencies find an edge in starting with modest service-oriented architecture projects
Thinking about implementing a service-oriented architecture? Maybe you want to find an easier way to share information with other organizations. Or perhaps you want to be able to quickly modify your information technology systems when managers find a better way to pursue the agency’s mission.
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SOA can help with all that, but if you’re getting started on it, experts have two words of advice: Start small. Incremental change and gradual improvements are better than trying to SOA-enable your entire IT infrastructure.
SOA is a design approach that integrates business and IT strategies to provide users with common services that leverage existing and new functionality. A key goal is the development of a business and technology architecture that can support changing regulatory, business and customer needs.
The process can be arduous and costly, though. Systems need to be inventoried. Users need to be interviewed. The system logs must be analyzed. New applications need to be written, and existing applications need to be tweaked to more effectively participate and communicate within an SOA environment.
Federal time constraints
SOA-enabled systems in the federal government are still somewhat rare. One early adopter was the Federal Trade Commission, with its Consumer Information System. FTC contracted with Bluedog, a systems integrator and software developer, to upgrade the system, which distributes fraud and identity theft information to a broad range of users and applications.
Bluedog had worked on projects to SOA-enable systems at several government agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and Justice Department, so the company was prepared for the FTC project.
Bluedog had about nine months to complete the job, said Tom Termini, a consultant at the company. He credited FTC chief information officer Stephen Warren with being technology-savvy enough to have a vision for how he wanted SOA to be implemented and articulate that vision to his customers, the FTC commissioners.
Because Bluedog was under time constraints, the consultants wanted to keep things simple. A lesson learned from previous work with Justice was the need to talk with business customers to find out exactly what their pain points were. Then they picked a half-dozen areas to address those issues.
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