SOA? Get the business involved, say IT chiefs

Getting the business to understand the need for service-oriented architecture (SOA) projects is key to the success of any such initiative, according to industry experts.

Speaking at an IDC conference on SOA in London this week, IT executives from financial services provider Travelex and virtual network operator Vanco said the major hurdle for deployments is getting the business to understand the architecture and the business benefits it will bring.

Sailesh Panchal, global architect for Travelex, said one of the biggest difficulties was getting the business to understand the architecture and getting everyone speaking the same language.

Travelex has now fully rolled out Unify's SOA - in part to help the company comply with the upcoming Sepa regulations.

Panchal said as Travelex's payments systems go electronic, a standardised architecture was needed to deal with the increased volumes of traffic.

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David Doherty, global IT programme director of Vanco, said to get the business interested in SOA Vanco had to implement the technology "in a real business way with real business benefits".

Vanco is using SeeBeyond's SOA-based Sun Java Integration Suite to buff up the company's business process management – including a problem management system allowing customers to inform Vanco of their troubles via a variety of means, such as email or texting.

The Vanco architecture has been up and running for 18 months now and Doherty said although the operational specification of their SOA was sound the "devil is in the detail" with such deployments.

Doherty added: "We had to work out what each service is and how it's going to work and the parameters it will need to work properly."

Doherty added companies in a similar position need to get to know the partners' processes at a high level before developing the detail of how the infrastructure will work.