The Department of Health and Human Services is finding service oriented architecture to be a key piece of IT infrastructure consolidation, and has made it an element of its IT strategic plan.
For the department’s diverse users, such consolidation will “meet their unique business objectives while achieving compatibility, interoperability, and open communication and eliminating unnecessary duplication of functions and infrastructure,” according to the plan.
Under an SOA architecture, various application components may provide services such as producing data, validating customers or providing analytical services, leveraging those services within a single domain. In practical terms, SOA allows planners to deliver and manage services more broadly across the enterprise, and to create a common, shared view, for instance by allowing multiple agencies to access a client file in order to deliver coordinated services.
As an added benefit, SOA also allows IT leaders to reuse component from legacy systems. That’s a big win: In a recent survey of 150 government health and human service IT leaders by the Center for Digital Government, 75 percent of respondents agreed they need software systems that work with existing IT investments. Thus, SOA fulfills a range of agency priorities, while enhancing collaboration across the enterprise.
Even as these benefits accrue, HHS also has found a strong financial rationale to support its ongoing SOA implementation. With the growing popularity of SOA, vendors have stepped up with off-the-shelf solutions that can be deployed consistently across the enterprise. With a well-defined architecture, IT managers can therefore integrate SOA into existing systems without having to build from scratch.
Read more success stories in our free white paper, “Benefiting from IT infrastructure consolidation.”
