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Service-Oriented Anarchy
Shaklee and FormFactor established SOAs to flex their own internal application portfolios. Things get more complicated when SOA has to interface with dozens of external systems for partners, suppliers and customers. And these complications throw a spotlight on the need for effective governance.
That was the case at Cary, N.C.-based Railinc Corp., the largest provider of real-time interline rail data in the North American transportation industry. A wholly owned subsidiary of the Association of American Railroads, Railinc's computer systems connect railroads, shippers, equipment owners and suppliers along every link of their supply chains.
Most of Railinc's information interchange has historically been conducted through electronic data interchange (EDI) messaging. But the company sees Web services as a way to automate information sharing with a greater number of participants in its supply chain, many of which don't have EDI infrastructure in place.
In the past, these partners had to report or acquire information from Railinc by talking to someone on the phone; by sending email or documents; or by manually filling out forms on the Web. Now, these partners can have their systems communicate directly with Railinc's systems. But coordinating Web services with company systems beyond Railinc's control introduces a major problem: governance. It's a challenge that the industry is only beginning to understand.
SOA provides services on the network that involve "security, privacy and the dynamic nature of services," says Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst for ZapThink LLC, an IT advisory firm in Waltham, Mass. If someone "makes changes or adds capabilities, how does your infrastructure roll with the punches? This becomes even more complicated when you have many different players sharing services."
Garry Grandlienard, director of IT for Railinc, agrees. "[Governance] is a much bigger challenge than the technology," he says. "We're talking about making our existing systems into a set of services continuously available to hundreds of different companies. We're just beginning to figure out how we're going to govern all these Web services."
Railinc chose to deploy Web services by building interfaces only at customer request or to answer specific internal needs. It's a conservative model that the rail industry appreciates and is slowly but steadily embracing.
"Our industry is on the early end of the adoption curve," says CIO Todd Bolon. "We've strategically enabled some applications via Web services, and customers were pleased with the results. They told us they'd like to see more. So now, as we plan projects, we consider Web services as a way to provide information."
One example is a large tank car company that doesn't have an EDI infrastructure. For years it had to manually enter and retrieve results of tank car inspections using a Web-based form. Now Web services, embedded in the tank car company's back-office system, automatically feed results from tests of tanks, air breaks, tank fittings, safety appliances and more, straight into Railinc's systems.
"They wanted to connect with us on a system-to-system basis, so we built Web services to enable that," Grandlienard explains. "The technology was not a huge challenge; governance is. First we have to work with customers to get things working, and then any changes we make need to be retrofitted to everyone else. It can quickly become burdensome."
Still, despite these caveats, SOA is clearly redefining how CIOs and IT organizations approach the delivery of business automation. "It's enabled me to reduce my staff by 20%, while I'm changing about 90% of the systems," says Shaklee's Harris. And my remaining people are spending much, much, much more time with the business people who use the technology rather than with the techies who implement it. It's a revolution."
Lee Levin is a freelance technology reporter based in Philadelphia.
He can be reached at editor@ciodecisions.com.
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