SOA Services Everywhere Strategy

Through an effective SOA strategy,integration capabilities such as business process transformation, sophisticated process orchestration, enforcement of security policies or auditing can be provided as services.

These services can be deployed as many times as necessary and in any combination. This offers organizations the flexibility to deploy precisely the integration capabilities required, to scale those capabilities independently of one another and to incorporate them as processing stages between any set of applications.Infogain has established a unique SOA implementation methodology that is driven by a maturity model used to perform a gap analysis between an organization’s current and desired SOA maturity level. The process is supported by accelerators, including frameworks, simulators and templates, and a phased roadmap that can catalyze and greatly reduce both costs and time to implementation. Ultimate results will be achieved when SOA services is adopted as an enterprisewide strategy; however, the roadmap can be set up to achieve early wins for a department or a functional unit.

SOA Increasing IT agility

Infogain’s SOA and Integration QuickStart program is a 1-3 week roadmap and information assessment wherein a senior consultant from our Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Integration Practice works with you to provide the thought leadership and strategic “next step” guidance to ensure a comprehensive framework,and end-to-end SOA strategy, for implementation and governance.We assess your SOA maturity level in the areas of Tactical SOA, SOA Governance and SOA.

Maturity Model Alignment to drive:

• Services enablement and design for internal and shared services
• Comprehensive SOA governance for both design time and runtime
• Business Agility attainment by embracing all layers of the SOA maturity model
• Services aggregation through process orchestration for effective enterprise application integration and straight through processing to eliminate manual steps
• Evaluation of business process management strategies to integrate functional silos
• Analysis of electronic document access strategies for real-time business intelligence
• Transformation to an agile enterprise through the adoption of SOA best practices

Streamlining Claims Services

It is well known that retaining existing customers is always more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. The claims experience is pivotal to customer retention. The claims strategy has three fundamental pillars: claims efficiency, claims effectiveness and customer service. With legacy infrastructure where various systems are distributed heterogeneously and working in silos, it is hard for insurers to provide customer claims efficiently and in short time. Customers are always eager to know the status of claims as soon as possible. With systems which are not synchronized quickly, it is almost impossible for the insurer to provide an accurate status of claims to the customer.

SOA EXCEPTION MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES

SOA emphasizes loosely coupled reusable services which must be composable to achieve agility. This makes applications more distributed and essentially the service layer resides over the component/business function provider layer. To comprehend challenges in exception management in SOA world these factors must be considered and issues arising due to multiple technologies among cooperating applications should also be taken into consideration.

Exception Logging:The Exception logs of services/applications consuming other services may contain information in various formats as they may use different database schemas or different log file formats. It is very difficult to query/report against these distributed logs stored in different places. This handicap becomes more prominent with limited access to support staff in production environment.

Exception Notification:Every enterprise notifies concerned service owner, support staff in its unique way and these unique way changes over time period. Off shoring also adds its own complexity to the scenario.

IT teams to develop roadmap to adopt SOA

The SOA implementation engages Business and IT teams to develop roadmap to adopt SOA which can maximize the RoI and minimize the Total Cost of Ownership (ToC). This planning follows Rolling Wave methodology to incorporate changing business and technical requirements. This approach also brings visibility to projects in incremental fashion while considering dynamic environment. The resulting plan includes manpower cost & deployment, software & hardware environment deployment, outsourcing & off-shoring considerations, time lines, dollar costs.

SOA with Business Process Management

Implementation of SOA at the ground level starts with the implementation of very simple
services that typically involve a single step—most likely a CRUD (Create, Read, Update,
Delete) operations to a database. More complex multi-step orchestrations are
implemented and driven by standards like BPEL and BPMN.

Even after the tools have advanced this far and greatly eased and standardized application integration, this is an ongoing process. BPEL tools will be used to build services by pulling together various elements of the enterprise and making them available as enterprise-wide shared services.Read More/Download

SOA Versus Traditional Integration

Prior to the advent of SOA, the true contender for Enterprise Integration was EAI. A plethora of tools and technologies emerged in this space quickly to fill the void. However, due to a lack of standards in the initial stages several issues arose, including:

* Proprietary vendor toolsets leading to lengthy learning curves
* Complex and lengthy implementation cycles
* Department- or Business Unit-Specific containering for EAI implementations
* Limited application shelf life
* Technology-driven implementations without the requisite business goal analysis.


With each vendor defining its own approach to EAI, the selection of the most strategic toolset was often a daunting task in and of itself. The following table highlights some of the differences between the two approaches.