Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Case 5 - Data Service Provider
The company is the IT service provider for the Austrian public sector. Its two major
customers include the Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Justice, whose IT infra-
structure and architectural development are at very different stages.
The main drivers behind SOA initiatives were flexibility, quicker time to market,
cost efficiency and synergy potential through services reuse. In the Ministry of Fi-
nance SOA is currently being implemented in the area of customs and taxes. The
initial project started in 2007 and it was originally planned to transform the entire
applications landscape service-oriented. In the Ministry of Justice SOA has been
approached incrementally, focusing on optimization potential in the area of process
development, currently services specification and development accounts for about
15% of the annual IT budget. For any initial SOA investments, similar to projects
which are legally required to be implemented, no ROI calculations have to be com-
pleted. The main drivers that facilitated the decision to pursue SOA were qualitative
aspects such as flexibility, transparency and faster time-to-market. Every continuous
investment is evaluated based on several key criteria, e.g. IT strategy fit, investment
costs, cost saved in operations and development. Current projects such as the elec-
tronic document exchange have been easy to justify as the calculation of time to be
saved by eliminating manual process steps.
Case 6 - Insurance Group
The company is an international insurance group with its headquarters in Vienna. It is
present in more than 20 countries in Europe and together with all its subsidiaries
abroad, the company employs more than 20,000 employees and serves more than 7
million customers. The company is one of the SOA pioneers in Austria and has one of
the most SOA-intensive architectures in the country. SOA currently accounts for
approximately 1/3 of the total architecture of the group utilizing mostly web services,
while large part of the group's architecture is comprised of old legacy systems. The
main reasons behind the SOA implementation were expected efficiency increases, IT
centralization as well as cost savings. After first steps in the late nineties, the scope of
the first big SOA initiative included a business process management system, which
was originally implemented as a pilot project by the company's own development
team. However, the group decided to shift from in-house development to investing
in ready-made solutions instead. The first large investment into SOA was not sup-
ported by any ROI calculation due to its strategic importance; still all continuous
investments in the company are usually evaluated based on qualitative and quantita-
tive aspects. Qualitative aspects include the alignment of IT and business processes
overall efficiency improvements. Quantitative aspects consist of a 3-year Total Cost
of Ownership calculation.
4 Research Results Analysis
After evaluating 6 cases of SOA implementations in large Austrian companies in
various industries a distinct pattern of investment criteria has been examined which
is depicted in Table 1. In almost all cases, initial investments into SOA were sup-
ported by primarily qualitative aspects. These included transparency, efficiency and