Synovus Financial was awarded top honors in the CIO Magazine | SOA Consortium case study contest for a Secure Value Payments (SVP) initiative. At the time of the announcement, I mentioned that more information from the winners and entrant pool was forthcoming. [Honestly, there were really no "losing entries". Tons of good cases and lessons.]
After promising "more", I promptly took a couple of days off. Luckily, CIO.com's Esther Schindler was hard at work, following up with Synovus Financial on their entire SOA strategy. In a new article on CIO.com, Esther discusses the SVP initiative, along with related technical and business wins:
"Synovus has had plenty of technical and business wins. Prior to the SOA implementation, Mize explained, customer and account information, funds transfer, credit card balances and intraday bank balances and transactions were not possible outside the branch channel. "Now this data has been integrated into call center, Internet and mobile banking channels using services from the banking and credit card legacy systems," he wrote.
The result is that the IT department could increase the business' ability to bring new products to market. For instance, Internet banking was the first company-level SOA project. As a follow-on, Mize explained, the business deployed mobile banking with less than 500 hours of IT involvement because the Internet banking Web services were reused in the mobile channel. "IT was able to bring great project ROI and business agility to deploy new products like SVP to the end customer," wrote Mize.
The company had plenty of "lessons learned," which may help your company in its own SOA adoption. For example, to make a success of the business IT architecture, Mize recommends, it's important to educate the business on design decisions that may compromise architectural principles. Leverage your business objectives to fund your SOA on a pay-as-you-go basis, he recommends; don't overbuild or over-promise."
Check out the full article. And yes, more information is coming. Really... Including, as requested, a post on the judging criteria.
[Disclosure: The SOA Consortium is a client of my company, Elemental Links]
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