When Legacy Meets SOA: Achieving Business Agility by Integrating New Technology with Existing Software Asset

A Service Oriented Architecture promises to drastically reduce the time-to-market of new products, leading to an overall cost reduction and to achieve "business agility", defined as the ability to rapidly combine existing services to support emerging business needs. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Health and Human Service Secretariat undertook an effort to consolidate the Information Technology infrastructure of its 15 operating entities into a Service Oriented Architecture. One of the stated goals of this effort was the integration of existing software assets into the new architectural paradigm. The introduction of Web Services, combined with an evolution of the technical infrastructure and development methodology, made possible a gradual evolution of the distributed architecture, in a way that was able to accommodate the evolving technology and at the same time leverage the existing information systems.