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GCN Home > 05/19/08 issue

SOA in a disjointed world

2008 GCN Technology Leadership Award winner Ram Murthy adapts Peace Corps architecture to realities of the field

By Rutrell Yasin

Peace Corps volunteers work in nearly 70 countries, often in remote areas where electricity is a luxury.

In that situation, how can you build applications that are sustainable and available to the volunteers and overseas posts? That’s the challenge Ram Murthy faced as director of application systems at the Peace Corps.
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The infrastructure supporting overseas posts and volunteers is connected in some ways and disconnected in others, said Murthy, who in April left the Peace Corps after five years to take over as chief information officer of the Inspector General’s Office at the Transportation Department.

“We don’t need [data] in real time, but if it can work in a near real-time fashion, that would solve our needs,” he said in an interview before his change of jobs.

With that goal in mind, Murthy spearheaded efforts to bring service-oriented architecture to the Peace Corps. His team delivered automated applications that helped the agency reduce costly data entry repetition, errors and process delays, colleagues say.

“In addition to being the lead architect of the SOA model, Murthy presented the business case to secure $1 million in funding to implement these solutions,” John Natali, a former colleague and program analyst at the Health and Human Services Department, wrote as part of the GCN Technology Leadership Award nomination.

It wasn’t always an easy sell. Others who had implemented Web services were incredulous on hearing the Peace Corps’ plan because the lack of connectivity in many places would affect the Web services that are used to implement SOA. Murthy said they asked, “Why do you need SOA? You [would] need Web services available all the time.”

But Murthy’s view of SOA was that, in this case, Web services should work in a different way — with the emphasis on providing information when needed rather than maintaining constant connectivity.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, Enterprise Architecture, IT Management



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