St. George Bank is well along the path to achieving a flexible business model and what makes a difference to the bank is the true partnership between the business and IT. This is not about the technology, but about the way you do business.

One of my most demanded presentations to CIOs and their teams isn't about SOA, but it is a mini-MBA course. The best-run companies have IT teams that understand the business. Get your business requirements in clear view, and then make sure you have a mechanism to ensure that those are taken from the business down to the technology. The advice around governance is one of the secrets of success that all customers called out.

Don't Throw Everything Out!
You can go after success in many different ways. But one thing that I've observed is the success of those who don't rip out years of knowledge, best practices, applications, and technology. The common thread is that all of them inventoried what they had and ensured that they selected an approach that let them leverage current resources. For most of the companies that I've worked with, the whole premise going in has been that the cost savings from initial efforts will provide the fuel for future strategic investments.

Reuse has been talked about for a long time, but previously technologies have never really been successful in bringing about large-scale reuse. And reuse has only focused on technology, not elements of business process and knowledge. SOA addresses this head on, with a focus on breaking down the roadblocks that have hindered reuse efforts in the past.

Reuse involves two areas:

• Technology reuse
• Business process or model reuse

Both are powerful concepts. Let's look first at the concept of technology reuse, which is the most prevalent way that companies today are realizing SOA's value proposition around cost cutting. A service repository is used during development as a catalog of services. It's where integration developers can go to see the services they have available to reuse. A service registry is used during runtime to hold all the "metadata" about a service - information such as the service description, usage, and versioning, for example.

The way that we look at technology reuse at IBM is that the breakeven point for reusing a service is 1.6. That means that the first time you reused a service (meaning, used it a second time) you're saving money. Reuse of services reduces costs by helping to eliminate duplicate development and maintenance.

The other area of reuse is on the business side. This involves reusing business logic. For example, suppose a company has a variety of customer services running on a federated model where each business unit operates autonomously and is supported by its own IT organization and infrastructure. The result would be that the same business process and supporting applications are implemented in many ways. The challenge of building a unified view of the customer across all the business units brings home the impact of reuse of business logic. Many companies will select the best practice for customer information and standardize that best practice into a single federated view - thus reusing the best practice process. This is one reason why the SOA approach is used when companies have done a lot of mergers or acquisitions. A lot of times mergers and acquisitions bring into play a lot of duplicate processes, thus reuse of the best practice or business model.

Reusing services helps companies standardize business processes. So reuse saves money and helps companies run in a more consistent and efficient manner by helping to eliminate overlapping and potentially conflicting services within the organization.

Don't Bite Off Too-Big Projects
Thinking incrementally about how to get there is critical. It's not just about the dollars that tended to be reinvested but more about proving and showing the value of success to the organization.

Have you ever heard about Zeno's Paradox? Zeno of Elea (circa 450 B.C.) is credited with one of the best-known paradoxes about the tortoise and Achilles. (Achilles was the great Greek hero of Homer's Illiad.) It is an interesting paradox and has been around for a long time. The story begins with Achilles and a turtle discussing a race. The turtle challenges Achilles and asks for a head start. In the end, they don't race because the turtle convinces Achilles that because he has a head start, and because Achilles must continually make up that distance, the turtle would always win. His argument was that Achilles would have to cover half the distance then half the remaining distance then half the remaining distance then half the remaining distance...and so on forever. The consequence is that Achilles would never win.

Rather than tackle Zeno head-on, let's pause to notice something remarkable. Suppose we take Zeno's Paradox at face value for the moment and agree with him that before I can walk a mile, I must first walk a half-mile. With the number of small distances, adding all those distances should just give me back the finite distance I started with. And poor old Achilles would have won his race.

The trick here is to understand where you need to go and then begin with small projects that help you get there. There are several key starting projects. These entry points help businesses pursue flexibility through SOA the right way: by taking a project-based approach and demanding that each project deliver real business value. A recent study of more than 500 companies, conducted by Mercer Management Consultants, showed that the successful companies surveyed are approaching SOA from entry points of integrating people, processes, information, or a combination of all three. So learn from your initial SOA projects by making sure they are small, well defined, and quick to implement.

About the Book
This content is excerpted from Chapter 9 of the new book titled, "The New Language of Business: SOA & Web 2.0", authored by Sandy Carter. The book is published by IBM Press, February, 2007. (c)Copyright 2007 by International Business Machines Corporation. All rights reserved. ISBN 013195654X. For further information, please visit www.ibmpressbooks.com (See Sidebar)