Previous page: Integration, architecture and fantasy
Nor is any one major vendor's version emerging as a de facto standard in the public sector, since the government uses a wide range of vendors to encourage competition. "You don't just have IBM and BEA, you have Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, Accenture, Deloitte - all moving in different directions," says Kuhbock. Industry groups like the Integration Consortium are trying to facilitate consensus, and vendors are starting to agree to disagree, but this process is proceeding slowly, he adds.
Kuhbock emphasizes SOA is not a software tool or an IT project, but an architecture that enables communication between services, data and processes. "If you're constructing a building, you need concrete, beams and pylons, but if you don't have an architecture, you've created an unstable environment that can crash. Many IT systems were built as silos, so they're like buildings that don't have staircases or elevators to join the first and fifth floors."
Adding Web services to link the floors without a master plan may not improve the situation, he warns. Should you just add a stairwell to link the two floors, or do you need an elevator shaft for the entire building?
Software can be used to enable SOA, but it doesn't create the architecture: a comprehensive strategy does that. "Once you map out the SOA strategy for an organization, then you can take out bite-sized pieces that are SOA-enabled projects. If you don't do that first, you're just adding another hairball to systems," he says, pointing out many SOA silos are starting to pop up in organizations.
"If you're using it to service-enable a couple of functions, but those services aren't spread over the entire organization with the proper governance around them, they'll just get lost in all the other hairballs in the IT infrastructure."
SOA in health care
Canada Health Infoway is promoting SOA to evolve e-health records across the health care sector, says Michael Martineau, e-health practice leader at the Branham Group, an Ottawa-based research consultancy. "Infoway has produced reference architecture and provincial blueprints as guidance for this. All the provinces reference it in their plans," he says, noting it's all based on health care organizations exposing a suite of services that others can use.
The SOA framework developed by Infoway is not fundamentally different from the federal government's approach, explains Martineau. "A framework can imply a variety of standards. Health care has some unique messaging standards and other differences in nomenclature. For example, when a service returns data, how it's interpreted will be different for lab data compared to an e-commerce transaction. But the conceptual framework is the same."
It's possible to develop e-health records without SOA, but Martineau points out calling them "records" is misleading. "It's a bad term because it's not one single record. The data needed for it resides in different systems such as medication, labs, etc. An e-health record is really a system to pull data from different sources, so this initiative is a great big integration project. SOA is the best way to do it, and that's why Infoway is pushing it."
But uptake of SOA is relatively low in the sector. In a Branham survey of health care senior IT staff conducted last fall, about half said they had no plans for SOA. "This has to do with the proprietary architectures and complete vendor suites that are prevalent in the sector," suggests Martineau. "Their view is that whatever the vendor gives us, that's what we're going to use, so SOA doesn't make sense for us."
Infoway faces many challenges in developing this area, he says. Many large health care IT shops such as hospitals are spending most of their limited budgets on maintaining their systems, so moving on SOA is very difficult. Nor is there any formal mandate to adopt SOA, beyond requiring it in project plans if organizations want to access Infoway dollars.
"But most of Infoway's projects to date have been provincial or regional projects, and I haven't seen much trickling down to individual health care organizations," says Martineau. "And there's the chicken-and-egg problem of vendors, who have to adopt SOA as well. IBM has been aggressive in moving to SOA, but some vendors are resisting as it serves their interests to lock in their customers."
Continued: SOA in municipalities
Related content:
SOA: A better ballgame with BTEP
SOA: It's architecture, not technology
SOA: Understanding the architecture
Where to start SOA: Identifying the big business driver
SOA at work: Ontario's common components
icon.
