Stores Magazine - October 2007 - (Page 114) CONSIDER THIS / ARTS UPDATE The Lowdown on SOA BY RICHARD MADER Have you heard just about enough about SOA (service-oriented architecture)? If you are a store manager, advertising executive or merchant, the answer is almost certainly “Yes!” In your view, this is technical stuff: “Let the IT people worry about it, all I want is a new POS function or an automated calculation of co-op advertising money.” But suppose I told you that SOA is very immultiple applications run the same processportant in allowing your IT support team to es it creates little inconsistencies that can provide these requested functions in a timely cause problems at audit time. Even worse, and affordable manner? Would that be all this duplication of effort makes it very enough to get you to spend a few hours complicated to maintain these systems. learning the business value of SOA? It In an SOA world, business, working with IT, should, because SOA is all about business identifies and defines unique services such — but it’s expensive to implement and reas “create a new product.” Then, that same quires a partnership between business manservice is used in all the applications that reagers and IT in order to convince the CEO to quire it, regardless of business function: One invest in this new technology. common service, one source of consistent Macy’s, Home Depot, Carrefour, Sainsinformation, one service for IT to quickly bury, Harrods, Amazon, Pier 1 and WHSmith modify in order to support business change. are just a few of the leading retailers that The other major segment of SOA is an have implemented SOA components. Their open architecture that allows ease of conRichard Mader is goals include: nection and communication with different executive director of ARTS. • Coordinating business and IT strategies technologies within the enterprise or with • Reducing IT costs external trading partners and customers. • Improving customer service ARTS believes SOA is a very valuable technology for re• Accelerating integration of mergers and acquisitions. tailers and has committed its resources to developing stanSpecifically, Harrods created a single view of customer dards to jump-start your successful SOA implementation. information; Carrefour migrated 42 legacy applications to SOA Blueprint SAP Retail and centralized its product databases into a Now in development for release at the NRF Annual Consingle repository; and Sainsbury created consistent supply vention (January 13-16 in New York) is the ARTS SOA chain information. Blueprint, which will guide retailers in planning their SOA Shared vision for the future implementations, as well as graph and fully explain the SOA is not a product; it is a strategy comprised of multiSOA infrastructure and all the required and desired compople components with many paths to implementation. It renents: physical network; middleware; security; enterprise quires a long-range plan and significant investment: the service bus; data repository; XML; and web services with ROI is not instant, but occurs incrementally as business related standards. processes are implemented as services. The Blueprint will define typical retail services within the Before launching an SOA initiative, business managefour principal business functions (buy, sell, move and adment and IT must partner and establish a shared vision for ministrative support) to assist you in developing your list of the future with realistic, incremental objectives. In essence, services. Additionally, each service definition will include they must collaborate so the business managers can fully description, business benefits, operations and technical asunderstand the role technology can play in achieving comsumptions. Imagine beginning your SOA planning with an petitive advantage. architectural design that defines the perfect infrastructure In an SOA world, the focus is on services, not applicaand more than 100 pre-defined services. tions. Every purchase order application, for example, conImprove your profitability and communicate effectively tains a product look-up/create function or service; so does with customers and suppliers — implement an SOA with every receiving, warehouse and POS application. When assistance from ARTS. 114 STORES / OCTOBER 2007 WWW.STORES.ORG http://WWW.STORES.ORG
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.