SOA Case Study: Agility in Practice

As boundaries within and between enterprises become increasingly permeable, there is a greater need for information flow. This is inhibited by the 'information silos' formed by traditional software applications. Service oriented architecture (SOA) replaces these silos with loosely-coupled services, enabling information to flow as needed, and delivering enterprise agility.

This is a case study from ING Card, a division of the ING Group, member of the Jericho Forum of The Open Group. It describes the first phase of their SOA implementation, with services that are hard-wired rather than dynamically discoverable. It illustrates how even this stage of SOA can deliver real business agility, and contains some interesting lessons for SOA implementation.

The case study was written by Alcedo Coenen. Alcedo has built his experience in IT since 1987, although he originally graduated in musicology in 1986. He has been working as programmer, information analyst, and since 1997 as (information) architect for ING and other companies in the Netherlands. Within ING Alcedo has been working on multi-channel architecture, a global SOA for ING Europe, a credit card system and on knowledge systems. Recently he has established a working group on the Business Rules Approach, producing articles and presentations for several architecture conferences and meetings.

Download the case study.