Soa In The Real World
posted by John Spacey, February 12, 2011In the real world, SOA often fails. The best way to ensure SOA success is to familiarize yourself with SOA patterns and success stories.
A Success Story
SOA is a powerful tool to solve data management issues. Have a data entity that is inconsistent across your enterprise? Wrap its CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) in a service. It's an easy way to centralized control of your data and facilitate data access.Our success story does just this ― ACME Carrot Company (name changed) was having problems with their customer data entity.
As you can see from the diagram ― customer data was being copied and changed in numerous systems and spreadmarts. This was causing numerous problems at acme:
- customers complained that Acme staff frequently asked them for information they had already provided
- staff were manually re-keying customer data on a regular basis
- key processes depended on re-keyed data
- no one trusted customer data because batch jobs left data out of date
- data problems triggered customer billing and shipment notification errors
SOA to the Rescue
ACME decided enough was enough. They laid down the law ― the CRM system was to be the master data store for customer data.In order to maintain open access to customer data they created SOA services to view and update the customer.
The Details
The details of the implementation reveal that ACME employed several SOA design patterns ― Enterprise Service Bus, Multiple Service Contract, Service Façade, Brokered Authentication and SOA Atomic Transaction.Data access and security logic was implemented in a component layer ― to be shared with other services.
Results
ACME Carrot's three SOA services - download customer list, query customer and update customer were widely adopted across the company. In fact, the services eventually had more than 50 consumers.The end result ― processes were simplified, human errors were reduced, employees starting trusting customer data and customers were never again asked twice to provide basic data.
This is one example of a low cost SOA project that improved key operational efficiency metrics and customer satisfaction issues.
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