Leveraging Service Oriented Architecture to Transform the Business of Government
By Atul Singh, Director Consulting, CGI Solutions Management

One of the hottest IT topics in any market is services-oriented architecture, or SOA. SOA promises to be a significant innovation for government. Imagine the ability to pick and choose business and technology services; to trade out services based on organizational redesign, new strategic intent, legislative requirements or business process modifications; to reduce redundancy and improve data quality. SOA is not another new technology. It is a whole philosophy about sharing and decoupling business processes from technology to enable a fluid government that can change and change quickly. SOA is the strategy that will extend legacy applications to handle business processes across government.

This article discusses how SOA can be leveraged by governments to enable them to overcome their challenges and accomplish their mission. CGI touches upon the factors driving SOA, how it supports government enterprise architecture, delivers business value and enables real-time control.

What Is Driving SOA in Government?
There are many factors driving the new emphasis on SOA, from the expectations of the coming generation to economic drivers to project management approaches to balancing time and cost. SOA has become the development and deployment strategy to deliver mass customization, composite solution development, reuse, reassembly and dynamic approaches within information technology that enables agility in government. The three key aspects of the government IT landscape driving SOA in government include:

1. Integration issues
2. Operating and maintenance costs
3. Legacy applications slowing down government transformation efforts

SOA is particularly suited to help government agencies deal with the obstacles to implementing the new systems that will enable them to modernize their business architecture, integrate agency service delivery and share information across organizational boundaries. With SOA, the focus on service interface definition treats integration as a primary issue. Integration is designed upfront, helping agencies to deliver functionality that can be shared between internal business processes and external government and private sector partners, without having to first implement complex integration architectures or take on separate costly integration projects.

SOA is particularly suited to government as it assumes that implementations will occur in diverse environments. Standard SOA infrastructure components provide interface points that not only work with J2EE or .NET implementations, but also enable interaction with the variety of legacy architectures used in government IT systems.

With SOA, governments can design application components that duplicate the elements of business service delivery in explicit pieces. The application components directly enable business service components, allowing organizations to define components that can be shared across governmental entities or across internal organizational boundaries, as well as program-specific services. The net result is an application architecture that mirrors the business architecture — a striking contrast to the current state of government legacy applications.

With SOA, the design approach is highly collaborative and iterative to address the issue of cost. Governments can now budget for smaller projects with smaller commitments and provide results in phases, taking on significantly less project risk and building a convincing argument for ongoing application investments.

How Can SOA Support Government Enterprise Architecture?
Service-oriented architecture is not a replacement for enterprise architecture. SOA supports the overall enterprise architecture by enabling agility so that the organization can respond quickly to government trends and disruptions, such as constituent needs and regulatory changes. The enterprise architecture receives several benefits that the whole entity can leverage with SOA influencing:

1. The business architecture with well-defined, reusable business processes
2. The application architecture to use components and service interfaces
3. The data architecture to use XML
4. The technical architecture with standards for infrastructure to support services, consumers of those services, services proxies and messaging infrastructure

How Does SOA Deliver Business Value to Government?
Doing business in government today requires the communication and collaboration of all levels and departments of government. Business verticals in government consist of public services, social services, regulatory compliance and government operations all working toward achieving the needs of constituents in the most effective way possible. Working across levels and branches of government is a complex and difficult undertaking that is further complicated by the governance and infrastructure that must exist to support it.

Today, government leaders expect to move quickly, using all information appropriate to make effective choices that benefit constituents. Enablement of this expectation requires an organizational culture that embraces the sharing of assets and information. Unfortunately, today's government infrastructure is not well suited to respond to the demands for responsive interconnectivity.

As the information technology industry matures, its ability to meet the needs of government will be determined by its ability to become ever-present in cross technology communications at high rates of speed, in a manner that simplifies the ability of government to achieve requirements. To accomplish this, SOA can be used as an effective tool for the business side of government. Technology now becomes an enabler by:

1. Reducing time and cost to implement solutions
2. Reducing solution maintenance costs
3. Reducing time to deliver constituent services
4. Increasing utility from existing investments
5. Increasing the number of features available to the organization

SOA focuses IT on being business-driven. The underlying assumption in SOA is that not everything in technology can be the same, so standard methods and processes must be defined to enable disparate technologies to communicate, regardless of manufacturer or language. The real value delivered through SOA is government's ability to respond to change and to optimize services using differing technologies as vehicles for maximizing constituent value.

How Can SOA Help Government Maintain a Real-time View of the Organization?
SOA enables real-time control when integrated with business intelligence capabilities. This capability can take the form of dashboards that provide agencies and departments with real-time metrics on performance. Establishing better visibility into the business operations provides management with the ability to detect problems and quickly intervene. An SOA solution using loosely coupled web services provides the ability to communicate with multiple business applications dynamically. SOA provides the following advantages in business processes monitoring of the organization:

1. Flexible and economic integration approach
2. Business process optimization through logical process modeling
3. Non-reliance on proprietary interfaces and expensive message bus/broker
4. Shorter timeframes for implementing new initiatives

To achieve the promises of SOA, government organizations must develop a clear vision for the role that this approach can play in their transformation, and make sure that all key stakeholders share this same vision. CGI stresses an incremental rather than "big-bang" approach, which helps SOA evolve into the culture while building credibility and keeping focus on the "big picture" of SOA's end state. During this evolution, it is important to establish the IT management principles and governance processes that ensure it can perform as promised.

CGI views SOA as playing a critical role in transforming the business of government by supporting, enabling, driving and sustaining change in government's internal and external processes and relationships. The end result will be optimized government service delivery, constituent participation and governance.