Manufacturers find OASIS in the SOA storm—plus a host of practical tips
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 2/1/2006 7:00:00 AM
Manufacturers still struggling with exactly how a service-oriented architecture (SOA) could help their business can pick up a few pointers from a seemingly unlikely source—the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, or OASIS.
The group, which typically concentrates on developing standards for making disparate technologies work together, has formed a committee to help users see practical uses for an SOA. The committee has a blueprint under development, dubbed Soalogic, to illustrate how consumer goods manufacturers can use an SOA to streamline product launches.
The blueprint includes a scenario in which a company introducing a leaf vacuum wants to reuse multiple parts, maintain efficient supplier relationships, and ensure retailers always have adequate inventories of the product. Under an SOA, logic and data from existing systems can be quickly shared as "services" to create business processes that accomplish these goals without costly systems integration.
According to Miko Matsumura, chairman of the blueprint committee and a VP with Infravio, which offers a registry/repository for managing services deployed in an SOA, "Our hope is these blueprints will help real-world practitioners by highlighting some of the best practices methodologies, and patterns available to them."
Another blueprint, called Generico, has been created for an SOA-enabled employee portal. Generico uses an SOA to tap into HR systems data needed for a portal.
Soalogic will be aided by a recent donation of intellectual property from N.Y.-based Capgemini, which has contributed a framework called the Methodology for Service Architecture. The framework lays out a notation method that aligns business and IT concerns in SOA projects.
Unlike traditional standards efforts in which industry comments are discouraged until a solid specification is devised, the OASIS blueprint committee seeks industry input early on, says Matsumura. The resulting "requirement documents" that come out of a finished blueprint contain processes that can work in the real world. End users can apply the blueprints as references for custom projects, or as "shopping tools" for analyzing the services and standards in packaged solutions.
"You are seeing the process of a best-practices community digging in and establishing the requirements for an implementation," says Matsumura. "So you are getting insight to best-practice methodologies, a logical sequence, and a set of tools that helps you do your job."
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