Capturing the Elusive Single View with SOA

By Dale Ferrario
Vice President of Engineering for SOA/BI

I’m always interested in stories about SOA at work in the real world — particularly stories about companies that have succeeded in achieving a single view of information across the organization. Before SOA and composite applications, this was a frustrating quest, to say the least. But now that it’s so much easier to pull together information from multiple applications and systems, more and more companies are benefiting from a single view of information.

The single view can mean many different things to different enterprises. It’s a single customer view if you’re a retailer or a services provider; a single patient view if you’re in healthcare; a single citizen view in government and public service. In manufacturing, it can also be a single part view or single systems view. And those are just a few examples. Non-profit organizations would no doubt like to have a single donor view. I imagine the army would want a single soldier view.

But I’ve said before I want to give people real-world examples of SOA at work, and that hasn’t changed. So I’ll stick to the other examples I just mentioned, which I know about firsthand from my work at Sun. More about those shortly — but first, let’s look at what it means to have a single view and how SOA can help create one.

The Power of the Single View
The single view brings together information from a multitude of systems to create one comprehensive view of the customer or part or whatever other entity is relevant to a particular enterprise. That means the left system is always going to know what the right one is doing. To give just one simple example: if a customer calls a company’s customer service department and decides while she’s on the line that she also wants to buy something, she doesn’t have to repeat every single bit of information from her account number to her childhood pet’s name when she goes from the customer service realm to the world of sales.

So basically we’re talking about tying together siloed data in a multitude of systems in order to provide a single view of it. And anytime you’re talking about tying systems together these days, you’re talking about deploying an SOA and building composite applications. It’s the only efficient and practical way to pull together information from different systems. One alternative is a data warehouse — and it can take months to bring a new source system into that environment.

An SOA-based composite application can integrate data stored in multiple applications, recognize related information in the data, and then link it together in a single view. Suddenly, you have real-time access to customer information — or patient information, part information, or whatever applies in your business — from everywhere in the enterprise, all at the same time.

The Single View at Work in the Real World
I promised in the first issue of this newsletter to “keep it real” and not waste a lot of your time on theoretical explanations and what-if scenarios. The following are the examples that I mentioned earlier; they’re all from Sun’s own recent experience with various organizations that are using Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS) to create single-view composite applications.

Retail: One of the largest department stores in the world is taking the comprehensive information about a customer that comes from a single view and applying it to crafting more-targeted marketing programs that are based on deeper insights into customer behavior. The single customer view also means that the store’s customers enjoy a seamless experience across channels (in the store, by phone, and online) and across store departments such as customer service, billing, sales, and so forth.

Healthcare: U.S. regulatory demands make a single view of patient information especially challenging because of the stringent privacy protection dictated by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). One large regional insurer is using Java CAPS for the secure exchange of data between internal and external systems to achieve consistent views across channels and partners.

Telecommunications: This services provider and its partners build and manage single-view applications to connect to customer information stored in databases, legacy applications, and packaged applications. Fuzzy logic is used to recognize subtle differences across applications. (Joe T. Jones in one system may be Joe Jones in another, depending on other variables such as address or account number.) Cleansed, cross-systems data is then delivered to users through Web-based screens to enable improvements in customer satisfaction and time to market.

Energy / Utilities: The single-view challenge exists on a particularly large scale for one of the largest publicly owned utilities in the US, which serves nearly four million citizens. The utility uses single views to provide consistent access to data across multiple channels, to meet customer demands for real-time information, and to streamline the process of launching new products, services, and channels.

Automotive Manufacturing: After acquiring another automotive company, this Western European manufacturer wanted to build new vehicles combining parts and processes from the two organizations. Using Java CAPS, the manufacturer was able to create a single-view composite application to support the project.

With more companies collaborating with each other than ever before, and more and more information being siloed in different systems throughout the enterprise, a single view of information is becoming a necessity for operating efficiently, making employees more productive, and building customer loyalty — whether the customer is a consumer, patient, citizen, or even another organization. Keep watching this space to bring you more real-world views of the different business challenges that SOA and composite applications can address. And look for Integration Insights to continue to bring you important information about SOA technology, ROI, and much more.