Applying Technology to Get above the Moving Sidewalk: CIO Forum, Part 3
By Chris Wain
Third of four in SAO’s 2007 IT Moving Sidewalks series.
If managing IT for a corporation is like building and running the moving sidewalks at an airport, how can IT respond when the business environment (the airport) is changing rapidly?
“The business wants to rapidly change where the ‘sidewalk’ takes them,” said Dave Weber, CIO of NW Natural (NWNG). “CIOs want IT to matter to the business – not just as a provider of sidewalks, but as a business partner.”
At NWNG, new applications will need to allow for greater agility as the business and its requirements change. The emerging technology solution for IT is to adopt a service-oriented architecture (SOA). SOA is a style of information systems architecture that enables the creation of applications by combining loosely coupled and interoperable services.
Multiple applications need to work better together, Weber said. For example, IT needs to facilitate better information sharing between departments such as finance, supply chain, work management and human resources. SOA is part of the answer to this challenge.
SOA can also help NWNG enable mobile employees to work more effectively. NWNG has 100 customer support reps and 130 field technicians who, Weber said, should never need to come into the office. Field technicians could complete more than their current two to four jobs per day “if they didn’t have to come into the yard to plug into the blue wire.”
However, implementing that level of mobility is challenging, Weber continued. “Client server applications aren’t as effective,” because DSL connectivity simply isn’t fast enough. Reducing the fatness of the client and pushing solutions out to mobile devices is necessary, but challenging.
Adopting a SOA can help NWNG thin down the client, using a portal or .Net technology. “In a sense, we’ve come full circle back to efficient small data streams like green screens,” he said, referring to the mainframe terminals that were common from the 1960s through the early ’80s.
Implementing SOA
The challenge, said David Neufeld (managing director of Online Business Systems), is to approach SOA as “something you do, rather than something you buy.” There’s a lot of hype around the different SOA disciplines, he said. “However, without a new approach, will we implement the same old things the same old way – only with shiny new toys?”
The answer: adopt the discipline to implement SOA properly. In part, this might involve organizing the services into components to enable a greater level of reuse across the enterprise. For example, “enterprise services” might include common and globally accessible components used in solving frequently encountered problems and requirements – including tools for managing enterprise requirements related to governance or maintenance. Exception management and alerting are two examples of enterprise services. These and other discrete services combine to provide a technical layer of common services to multiple applications.
The TransCanada Pipeline Company (TCPL) used an SOA approach to streamline the customer interface to multiple information systems, Neufeld related. TCPL had acquired other companies and inherited their information systems. Before TCPL adopted SOA, customers had to access multiple systems to move natural gas through the company’s pipelines. Multiple organizations used their own system with variations in the Nominations – “Noms” – that provide information on natural gas volume, receipt and delivery locations in the pipelines.
Rearchitecting TCPL’s systems provided customers with a single access point and representation of the company’s business to the customer, as well as a single Nom format.
SOA technologies
Although SOA is primarily a methodology, there is a defined solution stack with multiple vendors and products:
-
Middleware and enterprise service bus infrastructure: this includes software to support interoperation and information sharing. Leading vendors – according to Forrester research – are Oracle, TIBCO and BEA Systems.
-
Business process management: dominant players – in terms of market presence and product offerings – are TIBCO, webMethods, IBM and BEA Systems.
-
Business intelligence including data warehousing: leading vendors include Business Objects, Cognos, Microsoft and Actuate.
-
Enterprise business applications: SAP and Oracle are dominant offerings.
SOA: the challenge
At NW Natural, Weber concluded, the key challenge is, “How do I get the people who work for me to think in this interactive model?” His direction has been: “Write something that allows us to change the underlying pieces.”
For more information, see the presentation from this session “Business Agility and Service Oriented Architecture”
About the CIO/IT managers forum
In 2007, the Moving Sidewalk Forums will focus on how IT can and must drive technology business value. Previous forums included:
Mark your calendar for the final 2007 session on October 24: How to Measure and Report on the Business Value of Technology
About the CIO panelists
About the author
Chris Wain, a local marketing consultant and writer, is a 10-year veteran of eBusiness and Internet marketing. His eBusiness experience encompasses website management, communications, training, managing a user experience team, and transition and change management. He can be reached at chris.wain@comcast.net.
|
