Previous page: SOA in health care
In Ontario, the regional reorganization into local health integration networks (LHINs) is providing a driver for SOA adoption in some areas, he says. There are two main approaches. Where there are many versions of a proprietary platform, health care organizations are consolidating their systems around one vendor's platform. In Northern Ontario, for example, many hospitals are Meditech shops, and these will eventually be consolidated into a single version for the region, he says.
"We're seeing the same thing in other parts of Canada. Until Meditech moves on SOA, it'll be harder for these regions to move as well. But there are products from other vendors that wrap around Meditech to expose services as SOA to other apps, so it's still possible."
In areas such as the GTA that have multiple vendors and platforms, health care organizations are starting to adopt SOA to integrate within their regions, he says. SOA is the best approach for building modular interfaces around disparate platforms to glue health care systems together within a region, without getting bogged down in technical specs, says Martineau.
"For the first time, technology and business people can talk the same language," he says. "The process for conducting lab tests can be defined as a series of services and functions, and you don't need to care about the technical details or the programming language."
There are back-end advantages as well, he adds. "You can take a service and split it across several servers, do load balancing and so on. People don't care about behind-the-scenes adjustments. The old way, you did have to worry about this, as the business architecture was different from the technical architecture."
SOA in municipalities
Vendor issues also play a role in the municipal sector, says Roy Wiseman, CIO of the Region of Peel. Municipal software is a very niche market with small vendors providing specialty software tools. "They're not big-10 names," he says. "It's software for tasks like the collection of payment for parking tags and registration systems for voters."
Municipalities are primarily looking for off-the-shelf products, but their specialty vendors are slower to adapt to new technology such as SOA. Nevertheless, Wiseman says, he sees significant changes afoot in the future. "SOA drives the software development industry more than it drives us."
Larger municipalities such as Calgary and Edmonton, which have SOA projects under way, have more money and influence, and can attract vendors who will customize their wares or undertake software development projects themselves. But smaller municipalities don't have the same clout or resources, he says.
SOA is starting to trickle down to the municipal level. "Over the next year, we'll start seeing it referenced as a regular feature in RFPs for off-the-shelf and custom solutions," says Wiseman. But most vendors aren't ready to respond at present. "We're shooting ourselves in the foot if we make it a mandatory requirement now, as none of the providers are at that point."
Once it gains traction, Wiseman believes SOA will play a powerful role in sewing together the individual geographic information systems (GIS) across municipalities. Searching for GIS-based information across a province or region would become quick, simple queries instead of labour-intensive exercises.
"If you look at Peel or Ontario, there is really only one geography," he says. "All of us have one subset of information about that region, be it street networks, gas and electricity lines or land parcels. We can build apps to pull that in from different sources, but we all need to do that in a standardized way. Building one-to-many interfaces is where there's real complexity."
Simplifying interaction between organizations is where SOA has the greatest value, says Wiseman. "We can all build one-to-one interfaces internally, but when you get into inter-jurisdictional dealings, then you need a common language."
SOA can provide that Esperanto. But due to all the hype, some believe SOA is just another technology fad. While Wiseman doesn't believe SOA is revolutionary, he does believe it's here to stay. "It's the evolution of the same idea that's been around for years: object-oriented programming, CORBA and so on, which are all about fitting together software components so they interoperate." SOA will likely continue to evolve, perhaps into something with a new name, but the fundamental approach to unifying systems will remain the same, he says.
Rosie Lombardi is a freelance writer based in Toronto. Contact her at rosie@rosie-lombardi.com
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