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I was with one our very capable CIO’s recently when she said that her boss (the CEO) had been visited by consultants telling him that SOA is the answer to all her problems. He thought she could just go and buy one!
Don’t laugh (you should probably cry) these sorts of conversations are happening all over the world now. The consultants have discovered they can sell Service Oriented Architectures so they are. So what is R2’s view of SOA and if we think it’s a good idea, what are we doing about it? And oh by the way, just what the heck does it mean???
Let’s get first things first. Do we think it’s a good idea? Yes we do. Are we 'doing it'? Yes, in small pockets. Do we know how to do it well yet? Not really, if we’re honest with ourselves. Are we working on it? You bet we are. We have the ESD domain working on defining how to build services at HSBC.
SOA in its simplest terms is a business description of the services it needs its IT organisation to provide. SOA makes sense to business folk, and that’s why it’s gaining traction. So what is a service? It’s something understandable like ‘make payment’ or ‘execute trade’. Services are always named with a verb or action – because they do things.
Some think that classes, programs, and routines are services...they are not. They’re still important, of course because we use them to create services. Services provide the clean interface through which the functionality of these assets is made available and easy to reuse.
Services are used to automate parts of a business process. A business process then is coordinated set of human activities and services organized to accomplish a task. Some business processes can be fully automated, e.g. straight thru trade processing.
Specific services can be reused in many different business processes. Think how many different processes need a ‘make payment’ service? So done right, services are easy to reuse, and therefore incredibly valuable to business as well as to IT.
Services can be implemented by a variety of technologies, and in fact many of our services will be built using legacy code and databases. Our Customer Data Utility (CDU) is a CICS/Cobol system, but it’s redefining itself into a family of services that can be used in any business process; very powerful stuff indeed. It’ll take a long while to get there as our applications aren’t built this way today.
But if HSBC is to be successful in its goal of developing a set of reusable services (something like 2,000 is probably a good number) that can be deployed into flexible business processes, we need to implement the service interface in a consistent manner. We’re making great progress in defining and promoting R2’s GSM as the standard service interface. GSM is based on a powerful reference model we bought from IBM called IFW. We’ll extend the reference model as we build services based on GSM’s and make the models available to all in our enterprise repositories.
Many companies today are working on SOA’s. One insurance company I visited recently has a library of 320 services, running on a ‘service bus’ being used by a large number of applications built in a variety of technologies. The savings and improved time to market was huge they said.
So that's what services are about and why they are so important. If you want to find out more - speak to your local Enterprise Architect or your Enterprise Service and Data (ESD) regional domain owner. If you don't think HSBC's SOA affects you - then you really do need to speak to your EA or RDO!
我觉得最重要的一点:在国内,无论是甲方、还是乙方,并没有正在从IT技术方面对保险实务有一个完整的抽象,因此导致IT系统的散乱,导致维护成本的直线上升。
诚然,J2EE从理论上来讲可以降低成本,也有很多的优势。但是,如果对保险业务的本质的理解和抽象没有到达一定的水平,那么维护还是困难的,而这种困难不是简单使用那种构架就能解决问题的。
其实,人才不是问题,只要有保险公司用什么样的技术,就会有人会什么样的技术。
SOA in its simplest terms is a business description of the services it needs its IT organisation to provide. SOA makes sense to business folk, and that’s why it’s gaining traction. So what is a service? It’s something understandable like ‘make payment’ or ‘execute trade’. Services are always named with a verb or action – because they do things.
Some think that classes, programs, and routines are services...they are not. They’re still important, of course because we use them to create services. Services provide the clean interface through which the functionality of these assets is made available and easy to reuse. |
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