SOA Can Deliver On Promise With Right Strategies In Place
Plug and Play
According to FAMI's Edwardson, the carrier plans to go live in early June with Bedford, Mass.-based Progress Software's Sonic ESB, an enterprise service bus, as the core of a large technology modernization effort. The goal of the enterprise service bus solution, Edwardson says, is to improve ease of use on future integration efforts with various new and existing applications.
"Historically, what we've recognized with our legacy systems is that, when we bring in a new product or a new application, trying to build that integration point has been doable but somewhat cumbersome," Edwardson explains. "Our hope is that -- around the whole Web services and SOA model -- as we move forward, we can [set up] integration points in a much easier fashion."
For Edwardson, that essentially is the promise of SOA. In a rapidly changing market, how FAMI processes its business today may need to be changed quickly tomorrow, he says, adding that SOA can deliver a certain amount of built-in agility to the carrier's IT organization. With SOA in place, changes can be made without having to tear down an entire business process and then build it back up again. "We're not forced to re-engineer our entire day," Edwardson relates.
Before embarking on the enterprise service bus implementation, FAMI dipped its toe in the SOA waters with a 2005 project that added endorsement processing to an already built-out Web application for personal auto new business submission, Edwardson notes. "We took that project and we said, 'Let's use this as a mentoring project,'" he recalls. "'Let's go out and find some resources and bring them in to try to help us understand the technologies that are at the core of SOA.'"
When that 2005 project quickly delivered business value, Edwardson says, the carrier decided to truly embrace an SOA vision. The enterprise service bus implementation, he expects, will help FAMI scale the SOA concept horizontally across a larger swath of the enterprise. "We thought what we could do was come along and use something like a services bus to not only leverage what we'd already done, but use it to plug into the vast number of applications we had across the enterprise, and use that to plug different integration points," Edwardson explains.
At a low level, according to Edwardson, the carrier has assembled workflows from a technical perspective. Essentially, he says, the company is developing more "plug-and-play" solutions, as opposed to hardwired applications.
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