Carmen Suarez is systems support manager at the Dade County Enterprise Technology Services Department. Her group supports over 40 departments serving Dade County's 2.2 million residents.
Question: Why did you choose to implement Web services, and how are you using them?
Suarez: We had a lot of projects that were coming down the pike that had integration and interoperability issues, so we had to decide how we were going to architect that, and we came to the conclusion that going with a service-oriented architecture and implementing Web services would be the easiest, and just the proper thing to do. We have a lot of mainframe and legacy systems that are written in CA-IDMS ADSO and we needed to extend those without being intrusive — without going into those programs and changing them a lot. We looked around for tools that would allow us to do that and we found one [Service Builder, from Neon] that could create Web services from those applications, and we used that to integrate with all the other systems that were coming in that needed to share data.
