<<Advocates for SOA preach that IT must align with business goals and
architects must design Web services to do what the business processes
require.
Sean Hickman, senior architect at Aetna Inc., says his company has
taken this one step farther where the way the IT works on the SOA
platform for the company's consumer-directed healthcare program is
based in part on health insurance philosophy.
"Aetna is a pioneer in consumer-directed healthcare," he explained at
the recent Burton Catalyst Conference in San Francisco. "Over the
years as consumer-directed healthcare has come out into the
marketplace, we've seen parallels between consumer-directed healthcare
and things that we can take from consumer-directed healthcare and
apply to service-oriented architecture."
The SOA platform that Hickman works on provides Aetna healthcare
policy holders with information such as comparative pricing
information on physician services and hospital care.
"The members are given tools and information to make better
decisions," Hickman said of the Web services he helps design.
"Recently Aetna made an announcement where they're going to make
available pricing information on hospitals and doctors online so
members can use that information to make decisions. So you can see the
theme of information and making decisions."
In its IT department, Aetna has a central services organization where
Hickman and other architects design, build, test and support common
services. But that does not always mean that the developers drawing on
those services for individual applications are making the best
choices, Hickman said.
Just as a medical insurance consumer might end up paying too much for
a procedure if they do not have accurate pricing information on
clinics in their area, an IT developer without enough information on a
Web service might also make a costly choice.
For all the advantages of reuse in SOA, Hickman argued that sometimes
uninformed reuse can create a problem. He offered the example of a
developer who employs an existing service that can do everything he
needs and more. Yet selecting a service that does more than you need
may not be a good choice or an informed choice.
"If the service is only going to be called a hundred or a thousand
times a day, that's not a problem," he said. "But if the service is
going to be called a lot more or usage characteristics of the service
change dramatically, that can become a real capacity issue. It would
be better if we had a services tuned to the specific needs."
To avoid this, the central services group at Aetna is supplying
developers with information about Web services in order to help them
make more informed choices. And just as the company's consumer
directed healthcare plan seeks to empower healthcare consumers, IT
consumers are empowered to make modifications to Web services to make
them more cost effective.
"What we find, and this is early in the effort, is some of the
responsibilities move to the consumer," Hickman said. "In this case,
we'll think of the consumer as the project team that will use the
service. The consumer takes on some of the responsibilities for
delivering a service. That takes some of the burden away from the
central organization. However, we think it is imperative that the
central services organization continues architecting services
throughout the enterprise. We also think it's important that they
continue to build services as appropriate, but not every service or
not every part of every service."
As is usually the case in implementing SOA, this has meant a change in
the way departments within an enterprise think and operate.
"We're not as ridged [sic] as when we started when everything about the service
had to originate in our organization," Hickman said. "We let the consumer build
the mediation in some situations. We let the
consumer build the transformation in some situations. And very rarely
we may even let the consumer do some aggregation.">>
I assume he meant "rigid". We all make typo mistakes when posting messages,
but I think this journalist was a little careless and over-reliant on a
spell-checker!
You can read this article at:
<http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid26_gci1197275,00.html?track=NL-451&ad=558325&ASRC=EM_CNL_357099>
Gervas
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