by admin
SOAs Too Big to Fail
8:30 pm in SOA Implementation, SOA Solutions by admin
In a new article out of American Banker. Steve Bills discusses how service oriented architecture initiatives at the two biggest banks — Bank of America and Citigroup — have overcome the limitations of legacy systems.
At Citigroup, Steve describes how the company’s CitiDirect BE (for “banking evolution”) cash management platform
includes user-generated content and a video channel. The result is a “flexible portal” that serves more than 300,000 business users worldwide.
At BofA, the bank “is developing
a payments hub that it expects to handle transactions for a wide range
of cash management customers, domestic and international, from small
and midsize businesses to large corporate and trust clients.” BofA will use the payments hub to streamline its internal systems into a single payment-processing
platform that spans all customer channel.
Citigroup is no SOA novice. A couple of years back, I heard Skip Snow, enterprise
architect at Citigroup, talk about Citi’s first embrace of SOA — creating a lot of best practices and examples for the rest of financial services and industries in general. As Snow described it at the time, as Citigroup
moved forward with Web services development efforts, the company
quickly recognized that such standardization and integration efforts
fell in line with its business goals. “We didn’t want to end up
governing a bunch of Web services with no particular relevance to the
business,” Snow said.
However, this was no easy task with four levels of CIOs and
thousands of technology professionals. Citigroup realized that it
“couldn’t create an SOA without a solid governance model,” Snow said.
Such a process had to be designed from the ground up, however, as no
previous model had ever existed. The SOA governance process could not
exist “as a step-child to the current IT governance structure,” Snow
said. “Our departments and sectors want to govern in a way that is
autonomous, not ‘one size fits all.’”
As Citigroup’s SOA became a reality, the company recognized that
this was an important way to reach its business goals, which included
maximizing shareholder return, investing in new products, and
organically growing new businesses within the enterprise. The goals for
Citigroup’s SOA effort included the ability to respond to an evolving
business climate, business service reuse, to drive down application
costs, and to allow businesses to interoperate. On the last point, Snow
stressed that the key to success of the effort was in business
interoperability, versus system interoperability.
Citigroup’s SOA governance structure is federated in nature, with a
“separation of powers” similar to the way the US federal government is
structured, Snow explained. An “executive branch” (IT) oversees
operational aspects, a “legislative branch” (executive management and
board of directors) establishes the goals of the SOA efforts, and a
“judicial branch” (enterprise architectural boards) deals with conflict
resolution. In addition, there is a separation of powers between the
federal (enterprise) level, state (divisional) level, and municipal
(departmental) level.
Another advantage that SOA offers is that it automates many
processes, Snow added. “SOA allows automated support and auditability
of the decision-making process,” he said.
