A Case Study in SOA and Re-architecture at Company ABC

Following September 11 2001, company ABC zeroed in on a home-grown fat client system, System E, as the enterprise data warehouse for risk management. It became mission critical for System E to remove key person dependencies and migrate from C++, a niche technology, to a more accessible platform. Under the leadership of a new hire, System E adopted an Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach to re-architecture. As company ABC’s IT unit is under a flat headcount constraint, an incremental SOA approach was the only way to get upper management approval. A pilot is well underway and scheduled to complete in December 2005. This paper presents the current/target architectures of System E, a theoretical framework for SOA, the Unified Modeling Language class diagram for SOA Model at ABC, and concludes with lessons learned from the pilot to date. Key contributions of the paper include SOA Model at ABC, and lessons learned regarding enterprise architecture initiatives.