CRM - May 2008 - (Page 34)

SEVEN STEPS TO SOA SUCCESS more modest. Companies need to understand how SOA principles can realistically apply to specific business processes before taking out the wallet. “Case studies are a great way to understand how SOA can help your company,” says Ian Finley, analyst at AMR Research. Additionally, magazines, trade shows, and competitors can lend insight. Discussions with software providers are another potential resource; Finley recommends talking with a number of providers, as some may deliver a self-serving version of the concept. Hundreds of millions of dollars will be invested in SOA in 2008, according to AMR, “much of it wasted.” Systems, calls SOA “a bridge between IT and business.” The technical nature of an SOA or Web services project requires it to be undertaken almost completely by your technology department (or outside consultants), but because the very core of the project is intended to advance business processes, it’s essential for seniorlevel executives to be on board as well. One of the most efficient ways to do this is to create a team built of senior STEP 2: BUILD A TEAM Nearly all experts agree, one of the most crucial steps in a successful SOA project is making sure that all sides of your company communicate. Eyal Danon, vice president of global marketing for Nice executives as well as top IT personnel. Michael Dortch, senior analyst at Aberdeen Group, says, “The best-in-class companies get the right stakeholders around the table, taking that executive perspective [Users] succeed by building SOAs to make their businesses more competitive.” By establishing a crossdepartmental team committed to your SOA project, you can ensure that individuals from all areas are responsible and accountable for the project’s success. Depending on the culture of your company, you may want to appoint one leader or guru to champion the project. STEP 3: DEVISE REALISTIC GOALS Think of an SOA project as something out of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”: It’s unwise to have a plan that’s too big or They Did It and SOA Can You Two winning approaches to services-oriented architecture (SOA), and the lessons to be learned The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (NYC DOHMH), the largest municipal government agency of its kind, began building its IT infrastructure on the SOA concept more than five years ago. However, multiple software initiatives and a quickly growing data registry forced SOA deployment to a standstill. “Without implementation services, our project stalled and the products were left to gather dust on the shelf,” says Hadi Makki, assistant commissioner and chief software architect of the department’s Bureau of Informatics and IT. To get its SOA project back on track, NYC DOHMH partnered with Prolifics, a systems integrator. The first phase of the SOA implementation was finished in 10 weeks, and the department began to see results immediately: The SOA solution enabled better data handling, eliminated downtime common to the organization’s previously implemented legacy systems, and improved file handling by 2,500 percent, thereby freeing up countless staff work hours. NYC DOHMH has been most successful using a project-byproject strategy (see Step 3 and Step 6). In the first project, pestcontrol issues could be keyed into its Siebel application by a call center rep, and simultaneously saved to a data warehouse and routed to an appropriate program to dispatch a city inspector. “Using this model, the Bureau can leverage this process for future reporting,” Makki says. “With the solid infrastructure in place, we are poised for our next phases of development.” Parametric Technology Corp. (PTC), a Fortune 500 software-and-services company, made the decision to deploy an SOA architecture when spotty point-to-point integrations between sales, finance, and human resources were not delivering the full data-sharing capabilities the company required. Before embarking on the SOA deployment, PTC first completed a data clean-up and conversion effort (see Step 4) which took roughly six months. To tackle its SOA deployment, PTC adopted Oracle’s Enterprise Service Bus, Business Process Execution Language, and partnered with Zanett, an IT services company. To ensure that the effort produced real business value, PTC tied the SOA plan to a defined project: PTC integrated three types of data, uniting price-list and product data to enable sales to quote real-time prices and delivering customer data to finance and accounting. Michael Lillie, PTC’s vice president of enterprise business systems, says that PTC is focused on keeping this project on track and has invested in Oracle’s Siebel Analytics to measure success: “What we’re focusing on now is how to measure this, how to stay on it, [and] how to report this. We’re meeting every three weeks to see how we’re doing.” (See Step 7.) 34 CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | MAY 2008 www.destinationCRM.com http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - May 2008

CRM - May 2008 Contents Front Office Feedback Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point Is CRM Too Hard for Microsoft Vendors Go Virtual For Feedback Sense-sational Marketing How UGC Can Benefit CRM DestinationCRM Dashboard Price Check, Aisle 5 Required Reading The Moving Target The Excellence Myth Seven Steps to SOA Success And They're Off! Are You Ready to Party? Skin in the Game The Right Numbers Secret of My Success Re: Tooling Connect Pint of View

CRM - May 2008

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