elaborate and demonstrates the major phases,
activities, and sample outputs.
Telecommunications: A short case study
Context: The case study is based on a telecommu-
nications company that we will fictitiously name
Good Telecom. The company decided to focus on a
service-order creation process to create new services
for an SOA project. They wanted to ensure that the
service plans and service features would be offered
consistently across the various channels: point of
sale, Web, and customer service representatives.
The business logic and rules were maintained in
their mainframe computer. The channels were
allowed to override the price plans offered by the
back-end systems. This often led to a situation in
which a user could get certain features or price plans
at a better discount from one channel compared
with the other. The company quickly realized that
this is not a good business practice and made it
business goal to provide consistent services across
all channels.
Problem: To address the business goal of providing
consistent service across channels while creating
new service orders. Discussions with the client
subject-matter experts and detailed analysis of the
relevant systems and IT environment revealed the
following challenges and opportunities:
Duplicate logic had a negative impact on mainte-
nance and support costs.
Multiple calls to back-end systems resulted in
expensive mainframe CPU-cycle consumption and
had a negative impact on network traffic.
An inflexible design and architecture could not
support variations—for example, varying features
by region.
Performance was degraded by unstructured code,
duplicate code, and code that was not required—
that is, it did not support any specific business
function.
Solution: To address these problems, the following
SOMA capability patterns, also known as techniques
(reusable parts of a larger method) were applied:
Service identification: Decompose the service-
order creation process to identify services.
Service specification: Develop service-interface and
message specifications, service dependencies,
service interactions, the component model, and
identify reusable patterns.
Existing asset analysis: Conduct detailed analysis
of COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language)
modules and copybooks. This was needed to
develop an approach to either consolidate or
refactor the code.
Service refactoring and rationalization: Determine
service granularity and apply a defined set of
criteria called a service litmus test (SLT) to
determine which candidate services are appropri-
ate to expose—that is, to publish using Web
Services Description Language (WSDL).
Technical feasibility exploration: Identify potential
viable solutions to various problems, such as the
conversational nature of the service request when
the front-end systems have to interact with back-
end systems several times in order to service the
request. Multiple fine-grained transactions to
fulfill a service request have an impact on the
service performance and hence user experience.
Consequences: The application of the above capa-
bility patterns helped in developing a solution to
resolve the challenges:
Duplicate logic was addressed by analyzing
existing assets to develop refactoring approaches
and by creating common reusable components.
The problem of multiple calls to back-end systems
was addressed by refactoring logic into appropri-
ate SOA layers, by adding mediation logic in the
integration layer and business logic in the service-
component layer, and by caching.
The inflexible design and architecture was recti-
fied by refactoring the code and by creating
common reusable components.
Performance was improved by all of the above.
Case study: XYZ Financial Services
The XYZ Financial Services case study is a com-
posite of real-world experiences with multiline
financial institutions. We use it to describe SOMA
concepts and the key activities of the method that
are recommended to identify, specify, realize,
implement, and deploy services as prescribed by the
SOMA method.
XYZ Financial Services, Inc., (XFS) has two major
lines of business: insurance and investment. Its
market analysis had revealed that the aging of baby
boomers and their changing needs in their retire-
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