Integration saves time and money

For Jeremy Gray, head of IT architecture at financial services giant Prudential UK, SOA is about serving the business with demonstrable efficiency improvements. The Pru built an SOA to unite disparate elements, including assets from its Scottish Amicable merger, and annuities, life and pensions, and group pensions units.

“The initial programme was about improving the customer experience,” Gray says. “Prudential had separate business units – so, for example, annuities and bonds were on two different systems. IT has always wanted to have better re-use of code across businesses rather than stove-piping code. We wanted to re-engineer business units, but also to be able to re-use services subsequently. Then you could see areas where services could be re-used such as identifying and verifying a customer, setting up a direct debit, or submitting new business.”

The need to harmonise led Gray to investigate integration technology. “A few years ago, J2EE and dot-Net were out there, but dot-Net was immature so we created [Enterprise Java Beans components] that could be re-used, largely based on XML,” he says.

“Web services were moving through the hype curve, but we had experience of using XML messaging with partners and portals. We ended up using the BEA WebLogic app server for integration and portals, and other tools such as Rational Rose for UML modelling to expose components.”

Gray believes that SOA tools have matured, but best-practice is still being learned. “Where there is a gap is in operational things like deployment, regression testing and managing dependencies. In an SOA you may have hundreds of components all talking to many other components, systems and apps. You must understand the implications of that for scale and security.”

Showing the return on investment is critical. “SOA is project-led but you must be careful timescales do not mean you cut corners. You have to get [gradual] tangible benefits. Financial Services Authority [regulation] changes can mean you have to change processes, and having an SOA means you can rework things more easily. When we re-use a service, we ask the department using it how much it would have cost to develop. We know we can decrease time to market for services from three months to three days.”