The term 'service-oriented architecture' (SOA) hadn’t gained currency in 2002 when TrueCredit, a subsidiary of the TransUnion credit verification agency, began deployment of an enterprise-wide portal. CIO Scott Metzger’s goals were simple: identify the business processes and the IT functions to be delivered through the portal, and reuse software wherever possible to reduce development cost and speed deployment.
But Metzger soon realized that the effort was something more than this one application; it was an excellent excuse to begin mapping out the company’s most important business processes to create an architecture that would let IT develop and modify the supporting applications easily as business needs changed. Call it SOA or whatever you want, says Metzger, but for him, the shift in thought that began with the portal application was a turning point in IT’s relationship with the business. “[We have] a much closer relationship with business [now]. It’s a great way to unify the organization,” he says. A March 2006 survey by CIO and Computerworld shows that 77 percent of enterprises adopting SOA seek greater business flexibility.
