In those days, the  entire IT department often existed because  of the company mainframe. Even  today financial services companies rely  on application and database technology  originally developed 30 years ago.  This clunkiness came in a variety  of forms and often invited amusing  terminology to describe its characteristics.  The ‘Lipstick on the Pig’ term was  often used to describe the practice of  screen scraping or network spoofing a  legacy application to provide a slicker,  apparently modern user interface. 

The term ‘Swan Syndrome’ is alive  and well today as a description of many  technical architectures. To the user the  system appears elegant and flawless as  it operates with seemingly effortless  efficiency, hence the part of the swan  above the surface that one sees. However,  underneath the ‘waterline’ (where  the swan’s legs are feverishly kicking and  manoeuvring) there is often a variety  of manual or outdated operations and  inefficient processes which are keeping  the entire operation afloat. 

Even with many modern SOA  projects, the difficulty encountered by  the technologists revolves around the  age old issue of integrating with computer  systems that were not originally  designed to be integrated with. So  various ‘devices’ are either purchased or  constructed to sit in front of the legacy  applications in order to make them  easier to ‘hook up’ to a Service Oriented  Architecture.

To be fair, it is certainly  accurate that some organisations have  replaced their legacy systems with  shiny new technology that fits well in  an SOA, however the reality for most  companies is that budgets do not exist  to rewrite systems that, simply put, still  work.  SO A benefit s  So where does all that bring us in  terms of delivering a successful ‘business  friendly’ SOA implementation that delivers  the tangible business benefits that  the chief technology officer promised  the CEO when the project started?  A well implemented Service Oriented  Architecture can bring significant  benefits to the IT side of an operation. 

These may include:  • Making IT generally more efficient  • Reducing the complexities of  maintaining and operating a myriad of  technologies that are past their technical  prime but, as discussed above, can’t be  easily replaced.  • Reducing and consolidating  the personnel skills required in the IT  shop to standards-based, easily hireable  competencies.  • Setting the stage for more cost  effective outsourcing of technical operations  by adopting accepted standards  that are already in place at leading  outsourcers. 

• Establishing an architecture  based on standards such as Web Services  and JEE eases the pain of integrating  third party solutions into a company’s  environment.  • Because both the architecture  and the technology being acquired  support the same standards, the need  to perform ‘clunky’, costly integration is  reduced, if not eliminated. Theoretically,  all of the systems should ‘play nicely’  with one another.  In many cases the whole rationale  behind investing in such a programme  is to simplify and bring down the cost of  running an IT operation.