Is your organization struggling with:

• Manual and error-prone business processes?
• IT’s inability to support business customers’ fast-changing needs?
• Integrating disparate IT systems acquired during mergers and acquisitions?
• Quickly integrating new client data into your IT systems?

CIBER’s Global Enterprise Integration Practice (GEIP) can help you solve these and other business challenges through the use of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to align your IT systems to your business goals.

Build IT Around Your Business, Not Your Business Around IT

SOA is an architecture, not a technology—a method of conceptualizing, designing, and implementing business software applications and infrastructure. It incorporates centralized and disciplined enforcement of industry standards, assembly of reusable autonomous business functions (also called “services”), and loosely coupled connections between services.

The objective of SOA is to allow businesses to extend the functionality and life of their existing IT assets, reduce architectural complexity, decrease duplication of services and data, and increase business flexibility and agility in responding to market changes. SOA is a way of molding IT technology around the needs of the business, instead of molding the business around IT.

Successful implementations of an SOA are built upon a sound foundation of elements which must all be present:

• Conceptual enterprise architecture—the essential framework
• Business and technical services—the heart of the implementation
• Enabling technologies—tie services together to achieve business functionality, and link SOA into current IT infrastructure and legacy systems
• SOA governance standards, policies, and metrics—control incremental development of over time
• Organizational and behavioral models—continuously evolve to support SOA enterprise architecture
• SOA integration competency center

When these are assembled and aligned to your business needs, SOA offers a compelling opportunity for your business to solve a large number of the integration challenges now facing you. It is not, however, a technical “silver bullet”, that can be purchased and deployed quickly, but is an architectural solution which engages the entire enterprise and requires a controlled, iterative process to achieve the “critical mass” of coordinated services that will yield real business value for the enterprise.

CIBER’s SOA Approach

To be successful, an SOA engagement must place important demands on the enterprise to adjust organizationally, behaviorally, and culturally. CIBER has developed a comprehensive methodology and toolset based on industry best practices to ensure that SOA is effectively developed and deployed in close coordination with the business imperatives that drive the enterprise. CIBER employs a set of well-orchestrated business discovery and assessment activities during the early stages of SOA engagements to help achieve the executive support so critical to such endeavors.

We also believe that service-oriented architectures, including Web services, can provide simple, reusable, standards-based access to business services, thereby increasing productivity, saving money and time. These services can be exposed through other interfaces including user interfaces (Web, IVR, WAP, PDA, Portal, XML) and system interfaces (EDI, Web Services). CIBER can also design IT architectures using Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) and advanced SOA, which are similar to SOA, but differ in technical execution.

Event-Driven Architecture (EDA)

EDA is an architectural style for using software modules/services where the modules are designed to post or receive event notifications. It is typically used in applications such as business process monitoring or algorithmic trading where real-time or near real-time performance is required. Just as services are at the core of SOA, an event is the key artifact in the design of EDA-style applications. Again, just like services in SOA, events must have a business scope to be employed across applications and enterprises.

EDA combines business services into transactions, flows and logical units of work but differs significantly from SOA in the messaging protocol, typically publish-and-subscribe, used in the EDA notification process. EDA also normally uses an intermediary notification broker that decouples the notifier and receiver, whereas SOA usually involves direct request-response messaging between the service consumer and service provider.

Advanced SOA

Advanced SOA (often referred to as SOA 2.0) links the interaction-based SOA and the notification-based EDA patterns within a single architecture. When implemented, the intended goal is that both event processing and SOA messaging will share metadata facilities, middleware messaging resources (such as enterprise service buses, or ESBs), security, management, and other common facilities.

Creating well integrated, advanced SOA applications is challenging because of the current scarcity of tools which combine SOA and EDA design approaches and which support the distinct messaging protocols employed. CIBER is uniquely positioned to aid customers in achieving a seamless implementation of these technologies where business requirements dictate that an advanced SOA solution is desirable.

As organizations gain experience in their use and deployment of SOA and EDA solutions, and as support for advanced SOA matures, advanced SOA will become the predominant architecture for enabling the agile enterprise.

CIBER Expertise

CIBER’s Global Enterprise Integration Practice can guide your move into SOA, enabling you to execute your SOA initiative. Having helped clients in multiple industries address their enterprise integration and SOA challenges for more than 30 years, we possess the technical expertise and industry experience to help you determine your organization’s need and readiness for SOA.
CIBER’s Global Enterprise Integration Practice offers the following services.

Discovery

The discovery is a short-term, yet high-impact initiative to capture your organization’s current state of affairs. Starting with a one- or two-day visit to your site, we obtain a “snapshot” of your organization’s current IT position by collecting and analyzing system-level documentation, business objectives, and vision and mission statements.

We interview individuals and conduct group analysis and joint application design (JAD) sessions to identify your business drivers and IT requirements, and understand how the system currently meets or misses business needs.

We then go off-site to analyze the data, meeting with you again approximately two weeks later with recommendations on how you can narrow the gap between current and desired IT states.

Assessment/Roadmap

A six- to 12-week effort, an assessment requires more rigorous information gathering, and offers more comprehensive analysis of your organization and enterprise architecture as a result.

We interview key IT and business stakeholders, review documentation, and conduct group analysis and joint application design (JAD) sessions to identify your business drivers and IT requirements, to understand how your current system meets or misses business objectives.

We assess the current state of your IT architecture and compare that to best practices for SOA. From that we prepare a gap analysis, which identifies high-level analysis requirements and priorities to determine the best way to move from the current state to an SOA-enabled state. And we create an architectural framework for the following architecture areas:

• Enterprise Application Architecture
• Information (Data) Architecture
• Technology Infrastructure
• Software Engineering Infrastructure
• Enterprise Integration and SOA Governance

CIBER can evaluate and recommend software and components, and can assist with return-on-investment (ROI) calculations and building of a business case to present to executive management.

The end result is an overall strategic enterprise “roadmap” that describes the scope of the effort, identifies discrete tasks and projects to undertake, and denotes timelines and deliverables to move forward and implement an SOA architecture congruent with business drivers for your enterprise.

Implementation

Experts from our Global Enterprise Integration Practice and our local branch office take the results of the Roadmap and work with you to design and launch your SOA initiative. This will involve not only technology, but SOA Governance, change management and disciplined business process re-engineering.

Our consultants will direct process standardization and documentation, issue resolution, and IT and data governance. Our proven, disciplined processes enable us to achieve project goals on time and on budget, allowing us to focus on driving costs and delays out of the process, so we can drive quality into it. We’ll work with an eye toward measurable business results: cost containment, faster time-to-value, and minimized risk.

Support

CIBER views every client engagement as a relationship, not a transaction. We can work with you to ensure that your system performs as expected, providing knowledge transfer to your team members so they can address issues as they arise. By nurturing independence while promoting project success, we offer you a smooth transition to the new system, yet we’re available whenever you need our assistance.

Why CIBER?

An SOA initiative is a complex, yet worthwhile goal that requires technology, cultural change, and discipline. It can’t be solved by the implementation of a single piece of technology, but with skill and a focus on the end-goal. For more than 30 years, CIBER has helped clients overcome their IT challenges. Our deep industry experience and proven track record of success make us the ideal partner for an SOA implementation effort. We have the flexibility, capability, and accountability to lead you toward a new, competitive, service-oriented way of doing business.

And with more than 80 offices worldwide, we have a local office near you to implement changes, provide project management and ownership, and offer a local single point-of-contact for all of your project questions.