Well, the good news here is that this is not really a news. Even the opinion
of IBM is not that new - last year they already re-oriented their Web Services
education program towards SOA and more - business-centric SOA.
So, what is this about?
Is it about database access via services and database sharing across an
enterprise? Once I flighted for such things and not sure I won - people did
not want to use service because of performance issue in comparison to the
local library for data access... From another hand, shared databases had to be
isolated from concurrent modifications (for different applications) and an
access layer/service was the only solution.
- Michael
Gervas Douglas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
<<For years, large banks, many of which have grown by acquisition
after acquisition, have been struggling to find a way to cut through
stove-piped infrastructures designed to support just one or two
business units.
They've adopted enterprise services bus (ESB) technology and
introduced enterprise application integration (EAI) strategies as well
as other integration efforts, but these, as often as not, have fallen
short.
To offer the new services and responsiveness their customers now
demand, as well as cut costs and redundancy, big banks are adopting
SOA. If successful this time around, banks will be able to use and
reuse customer data without having to maintain multiple databases that
contain, essentially, the same information.
They will also have the agility they need to meet ever more stringent
and changing regulations, said Donald Hanson, worldwide sales manager
for IBM's Banking Industry Solutions division.
"The (banks) that are most mature, are the ones being driven by
business imperatives to actually create more enterprise resources," he
said. "What I see when I meet with technology executives, is pressure
from the business to, of course, do more with less which has always
been the case but now, the business is asking for common types of
services to support the use of those services across the enterprise."
Process Improvement
For now, the low hanging fruit are common activities that most every
business unit in the bank uses. Things like account opening that sound
simple enough but often if you want to do more than opening a
checking account have to repeated to get a mortgage, a car loan, do
brokerage business with the bank, etc.
"New account opening is one of those core, common services," said
Darren Wesemann, CTO of SunGard, a banking services and software
provider. "That is not a unique component, but it's a component that
really helps traffic cop, I guess you can say, all of the data.
Because what new account opening does is the origination of common data."
And this is where banks like most businesses can really benefit
from SOA: the reuse of common data to foment multi-channel
integration, said Guillermo Kopp, executive director and global
research fellow at the Tower Group.
But this is still the dream. Banks are still focusing on using SOA
vertically to cut down on redundancies and streamline processes within
business units. A good, and necessarily small start, but to really
reap the benefits SOA has to offer banks have to move beyond the silo.
"Never mind how much alignment at the business process level," said
Guillermo, "if you don't get a common platform of data, if the bank
doesn't have a complete representation of the different data elements
that make up your relationship with the bank, it's pointless."
But not futile. Starting small is the only way to get to bigger
things, said SunGard's Wesemann.
To do anything more and you're probably going to have turf issues.
And, as is often the case at large organizations, you have multiple IT
departments supporting different divisions and all doing things their
own way. To break down these barriers in one fell swoop would be to
difficult and costly.
"In general, what we see the successful banks doing is they definitely
start very, very small," he said. "New account opening is a good
example and it almost doesn't matter because as long as you can start
small
in terms of (data) reuse, then they tend to be more successful.">>
You can read this at:
http://www.cioupdate.com/trends/article.php/3658866
Gervas
---------------------------------
Access over 1 million songs - Yahoo! Music Unlimited.
