One of the best parts of my job at GXS is my involvement with our early stage R&D efforts, affectionately (I hope) called "science projects". Although the projects vary wildly, there are always a few common attributes:
- we are trying something new
- potential customers are working with us
- we need to learn more to have comprehensive requirements
- the work is basically unfunded
That last attribute is the most fun to deal with; in fact, a really successful science project (like Order Lifecycle Visibility a few years ago, or B2B Scorecarding more recently) will prove its worth, become a "roadmap" project, get funded, and now it's not a science project anymore (sort of like a child going off to college, but cheaper and they don't come back to live rent free when its over).
Our latest science projects have been really interesting though, because in spite of the economic challenges, they are proving a bit easier to implement because of the latent value in previous SOA (service oriented architecture) projects completed in the GXS Trading Grid. I don't want to debate whether SOA is dead or not, but I can say with great confidence that mining previous SOA projects for "recyclable" components is alive and well.
As an example, many of our customers use the Intelligent Web Forms Service (IWFS) on the GXS Trading Grid for doing EDI with larger partners. This has all the benefits of a cutting edge web-forms based client, but also happens to be built on a service oriented architecture. In developing this system, our teams implemented general services to handle document arrivals, routing documents to other services, converting X12 (and other) formats to XML for rendering in web forms, and managing the documents and meta-data for all of that. Critically though, the teams did a good job keeping these services unaware of each other, as good SOA design dictates. Also, with the GXS Trading Grid acting as an enterprise service bus, there was the potential to access all of this latent value.
When, working with Microsoft, we set out to build direct integration between Microsoft Excel and the GXS Trading Grid, we were able to leverage many of these services to link the Excel users to their Trading Partners without change. Especially gratifying was the reuse of event-driven services, which in many cases worked without change (except to configuration).
I'm not sharing this to show how eerily we can predict our future needs, we can't. I share this because it was wonderful to mine previous SOA efforts and find that efforts around decoupling and encapsulation had paid off! I'd encourage every technology leader to hunt for the latent value in those recent SOA projects, and use it to drive innovation when organizations need it most.
One Response to “Mining past SOA projects for fun and profit”
Hi,
We have just added your latest post “On Demand B2B with John Radko” to our Directory of Science . You can check the inclusion of the post here . We are delighted to invite you to submit all your future posts to the directory and get a huge base of visitors to your website.
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