Reuse have for long time been the holy grail of IT and I have seen many Architects sell SOA with the promises of reuse. For the time there is much good discussion about the topic. The discussion was started by Miko Matsumura and David Chappel on his blog and newsletter. The discussion was followed up by Joe McKendrick, Stephen Anthony and Todd Biske.

I follow the discussion with much interest and reuse is one of the challenges with SOA, I will work with in my thesis.

Rambøll Management have revealed our organization as the most innovative public organization in Denmark with the "Golden innovation-price".

We won the price because of our big effort in promoting sound financial control and efficiency in the public sector trough digitalization. Especially development of EasyAccount (NemKonto), digital pay slips (digitale lønsedler) and Electronic invoicing (e-faktura) were large steps towards the vision of efficiency in the public sector trough digitalization. The three projects had high political, technical and organizational complexity. Especially Electronic invoicing have scoped almost all Danish businesses and public organizations at once and have not any precedent in the world.

Computerworld and NNIT have in an another context revealed The Danish federal authority of taxes (SKAT) as the best public institution in Denmark for using it to deliver better service and are so considerated as best practice Public Digital Governance. Our organization is not among the ten highest rankings or best practice Public Digital Governance-institutions...

The third and last Workshop about SOA in our organization is held. Our executives were very positive and conscious about the business impacts and challenges. The decision is that we will take a top-down approach to SOA starting from our new business strategy, which will be available at the end of September.

I and our Chief Architect are working with the further process and looking for processes and methods for a business oriented and cross organizational top-down approach to SOA. We are inspired of the presentations from the former Workshops, where the focus was on leavering the business strategy into business models with focus areas, goals, main business processes and services and at the end; SOA-pilot projects.

Do you have good ideas to such an approach? It could be a roadmap, framework etc. I am for the while seeking inspiration from BEA and MBT (Methodology for Business Transformation) from US.

I once had a talk with Rene Løhde from the National IT and Telecom Agency (now he is at Microsoft as a WS-envangilist) about interoperability. He told me, that interoperability is about understand each other by talking the same language and is done by standards. One of the main promises of WS-standards is interoperability.

In my world the most important standards for Webservices are XSD, WSDL, UDDI, SOAP etc. and standardization-institutions are working on more standards. Recently I found An overview of the Web services standards landscape with over 50 different WS-standards. The many standards must be further evaluated according to their matureness, profiles and that interoperability comes on many levels…. Yes, then WS-standards and interoperablility is not simple anymore. - and I can now understand how busy the standard-geeks are:-)

The second SOA-workshop is held with presentations by CEO of The Danish federal authority of taxes (SKAT) and a business development executive from one of the leading suppliers of corporate pension schemes in Denmark. In this feed I will summarize some of the most important points from the presentations and discussions.

SOA is (only) about business
This point is not new, but there was still a lot of focus on this point. The both cases started on SOA for helping leavering their business strategies. The focus in the both cases was on effectivization of the business processes, better customer service and increased cooperation between partners.

Take the example with SKAT: They started from about 2 years ago to sell SOA as a systemmodernization-programme (Should be titled "The business-development-programme" the CEO told) to the politicians. This was not successful at all. The politicians were not interested in reducing the costs of development and. Sourcing. They were neither interested in faster implementation of changes nor new functionality. There for SKAT dropped the systemview and started with a new business model with core services, actors and cross organizational business processes. Thereafter they evaluated the focus and effects of all the business processes combined with a new EA-programme, which pointed out 9 new strategic focus areas. The 9 areas were evaluated if and which effects SOA could have on them and generally architected with systems. All the work resulted in a lot of projects, which all where aligned with the business and the drivers for all the projects was cost reducing with effectivizing and digitalization of business processes.

This view is also supported by a Chief Architect at the staff of a ministry, who said that SOA is only about business. We principally don’t care about the it-aspects. - SOA is technology neutral. The technical aspects must be addressed by the development departments (as long they follow the guidelines and frames set by the central architecture department) and the it-decisions are be trigged by issues like competences, contracts, pricing etc.

No cost savings on systems
The CEO once said, if some consultant tell you, that "SOA is cheaper, kill him!" He still have this opinion and the point is, that you should not do SOA for reducing the it-costs. SKATs investment to the end of 2011 is 1 mia. dkr. and 0,75 mia. dkr. per year on automatisation and digitization of business processes exclusive reduce of the burden for the commercial corporations. Woooow, this is a good business case. This was the way their systemmodernization-programme was sold to the politicians and they got the approval and budget. He stated that the it-costs are impossible to calculate; the savings in it-costs are compensated by increase of costs of new it-initiatives.

Could it realy be true? No saving in it-costs? When I talked with him face-2-face, he told me that his focus in the presentation was on the politicians and the business. The politicians and business don´t give something for reducing of it-costs and they are familiar with the further promises of former new architectures and technologies. They had reduced systems, gotten a faster development process, pressed the vendors by taking the architecture in their own hands, but all this was not because of SOA. The causes were vendor management, project management etc.

So there for must the conclusion be, that the cost savings comes from optimizing of the core business and the support processes, not because of SOA in systems, but SOA can still help to optimize the business and leveraging the business strategy. Systems must not reduce the business agility, rather they must be ready to change because of the change of business and sometime be a driver for new business opportunities. One of my views is that SOA is an investment on a long term and the ROI can be measured after projects #2 or #3. Moreover is the main aim of SOA agility and flexibility and how can you estimate the value of these?

The target of SOA for the pension corporate was also focused on the business: Track of and simplicity across the systems and products, target oriented and relevant information according to the users and their situation, .leaning of the business processes across the whole value chain, reuse of data and reduction of processes and faults.


IT-effects
Some the it-effects SKAT realized (which must reduce the it-costs) are reuse and a lot of other benefits, when the platform is optimized and runs smoothly. The principle of "We take ownership for our architecture", "We make the plans" and "We make the priorities", yes the idea of that the customer himself must take ownership of architecture etc. All this have resulted in transparency and pressed the vendors to perform better and reduce the prices. All this requires employment of very clever and intelligent Enterprise- and IT-Architects in-house, who are very costly. But it is really necessary to get the good architects if the EA- and SOA-programme should have success.

As mentioned here we are arranging Workshops for our executives to dress them up in SOA and for getting their commitment and focus for our SOA-strategy. The first workshop is held with a presentation by a business and it-executive from one of the leading financial groups in Denmark, who are very mature in SOA and achieving real business benefits. We got a lot of good guidelines from the presentation and discussions and some of the main points are mentioned beneath.

Importance of top management commitment and Governance
The most important aspect in SOA, is the need of Top management commitment and Governance. The Top management must be convinced about SOA and often communicate the SOA-initiatives and the achieved business benefits to the organization. The top management may not only say yes to SOA-projects once at the project proposal phase, but must adopt the SOA-thoughts with their hearts and continuous evangelize for it and prioritize budgets, resources, projects etc. This is best done by centralized decisions and by one governance- and communication model.

SOA=matrix organization
The organization must by ready and mature for doing SOA. The organization diagram and the culture must change, because of the need for focus governance, project management, new competences etc. The importance of this was shown by the statement: "SOA is a matrix organization!".

The life is easy for it-people
The main experience of the financial group is that, the challenges for the business are higher than for it. Some of the main business challenges are common understanding of business processes and data, ownership of data and customers, having trust in others data and again governance.

It is just like that!
One of the discussions was the difficulties in aligning business and it. The answer from the executive was, it is just like that in their organization. In their organization business and it is natural integrated. This is a natural part of their culture, organization, processes and prioritization of resources.

E-government in Hong Kong is often positively referred because of the close relations between the commercial and the public sector. One example is their citizen portal ESD-life and the government is only one of the providers of services and content, since the portal also provides commercial services, content and advertisements.

The ESD-life is since 2001 based on a private and public partnership and the contract will run out at January 2008. The contract will not be continued, because of the new e-government strategy without cooperation with the commercial sector. The citizens want a 100% government-portal, do not want commercial advertisements and are afraid of commercial use of there private information.

The ESD-life provides 48 end-to-end e-gov services and links to other 151 e-gov services on different websites. The government also runs a SAR Government Information Centre, which is a 100% public portal with links to other 1.100 services on 200 websites. There for are there many and spread services and the services are not organized according to the citizens needs. One of the main initiatives of the new e-government strategy is there for to substitute ESD-life and SAR Government Information Centre with one 100% public citizen portal with one single access to all e-gov services.