While the ESB project alone cost over CA$3 million, Lafrance declined to put dollar figures on either the total cost of the SOA undertaking or the potential return on investment. SOA, he says, is simply the company's "new modus operandi."

Time to implement and related cost savings were not the only benefits, though. The demonstrable speed to implement also helps Aeroplan sell its brand when it enters into negotiations with a prospective new partner. "The SOA framework is not only allowing us to develop more, but also to showcase more," Lafrance says.

And SOA delivers a "whole slew of benefits from an IT development life cycle perspective." The framework makes it easier for his team to measure results and manage application quality assurance, for example.

Laying Out the SOA Roadmap

All of this has not come without some adversity, even though the Aeroplan IT architecture group made a good decision at the outset, Lafrance believes. From the beginning, the team's strategy was to break down the task into small manageable components and plot their completion on a continually updated three-year roadmap. The component pieces would be completed by incorporating them into business-driven IT projects.

A project, such as an early one to implement the first non-air rewards program, wasn't just a development project; it was also an opportunity to enhance the e-commerce framework while allowing the project to get delivered at the same time. This approach had multiple benefits. "It meant I never had to go to anyone and say, 'I need $10 million to build SOA over a five-year time frame,'" Lafrance points out. And that made it much easier to get buy-in for the whole idea of SOA and his team's approach. Senior management, including the president, was onboard from day one.

Lafrance admits he may not have hit on this strategy by thinking the problem through in linear fashion. It may even have been "a fluke," he says, chuckling. "But if there's one thing we've learned from the whole experience it's that this worked very well for us. I think it could work well for others too."

Partnership Challenges

Not all the lessons were learned so painlessly. When we ask him for the single biggest challenge of implementing the SOA framework at Aeroplan, Lafrance doesn't hesitate. "I would say overall, it had nothing to do with the technology," he says. "It's been primarily about establishing partnerships with new vendors."

One salient feature of Aeroplan's IT environment: almost everything is outsourced. The IT department has fewer than 30 employees, most of them analysts and architects. Principal partners include BEA (software licenses and application development), IBM (software maintenance and management and system development) and Telus (hosting and network services).

The project was knocked for a wobble when it took an unexpected year and a half to "stabilize" the first important long-term relationship, with Telus. "It's all about communicating in the same language, in the same manner, understanding each other," Lafrance explains. "And the kinds of checks and balances you do on a monthly basis to reconcile expectations versus delivery." According to Lafrance, SOA magnifies everything because it's so complex. And perhaps more importantly, the fact that it opens so many possibilities tends to crank up expectations and demands - and strains - on the relationship.

He initially believed at least some of the problems had to do with the specific players involved on both sides, but changed his mind when the company later started working with IBM, and the same thing happened. It was "a full year of very painful transitions", despite his team being forewarned and forearmed after the Telus experience.

"Anyone who thinks they can implement a technology like this using a new partner that they've never done business with before and do this in couple of months is dreaming," he says.

Legacy Challenges

The second biggest challenge: making the transition from legacy systems, most of them originally resident on Air Canada mainframes, as some still are. Again, it wasn't the SOA technology, or even the fact that the destination was an SOA environment, Lafrance says. The legacy environment in this case was not well enough understood or documented and its original architects had long since departed.