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Tuesday | 2 December, 2008
CIO
SOA: Here Be Dragons
With the SOA potentially creating reusable software code that must be accessed dynamically by composite applications, both inside and outside the firewall, the traditional roles and responsibilities of IT have been forever changed.
Sue Bushell 06 November, 2006 11:04:24

Waregem, Belgium-based TVH Group, which manufactures and services forklifts, has used an SOA to integrate internal applications and link with external partners, says Kalman Tiboldi, TVH's information and communications technology manager. As part of that effort, the company split its IT department in 2001. Support staffers for networking and hardware were kept in IT, while developers were dispatched to lines of business, including supply chain, warehouse and customer relationship groups, to begin working directly with businesspeople.

"The IT point of view was needed to implement flexibility - to dynamically change business rules," Tiboldi says. "We are getting the business flowchart from the businesspeople - step by step how the job has to be done. IT is involved daily to change the process if needed. You are able to dynamically and flexibly change your business model to the daily needs of the business."

Map to the Future Danske Bank AB in Copenhagen has been operating a home-grown SOA since 2000. Today, it has about 2000 reusable functions available for developers and 100 to 150 composite applications in production, says Claus Torp Jensen, the bank's vice president of architecture and development strategy.

Technology aside, Torp Jensen says that one of the bank's biggest challenges has been to help developers find the best reusable functions for business requirements. The bank devised a development model that includes business process management modelling to identify the best solution for the business and a parallel process to analyze possible future applications of the services built for a particular project.

The result is a services map - a layout of the building blocks the company expects to be able to leverage in future projects. For example, architects and developers could refer back to the map containing a service for verifying the identity of customers and then add the ability to check the identity of a partner to that service, instead of developing a new one, Torp Jensen says.

"I can give a programming team a set of descriptive models and tell them: 'This is what you are going to create'," he explains. "They have to code the pieces and not invent the structure."

Danske Bank plans to add modelling tools from IBM's Rational Software unit by the end of the year to help the company automate some of its mapping efforts, Torp Jensen adds.

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