British Telecom
Customer-Centric Services Lead To SOA Success
, Sep 26, 2007 01:08 PM
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
I had the chance recently to talk with George
Glass, chief architect of the British telecommunications giant BT, about its
massive SOA conversion. I asked him how he kept the services being created
aligned with a rapidly changing business. The question was simple … but the
answer wasn't.
BT is converting most of 3,500 applications that existed at the
start of its SOA project three years ago into reuseable
services. It started doing so at a time when the telecommunications industry
had been deregulated and BT had to start dealing with former competitors as
customers. Many specialized services, including DSL, could be sold over BT's
network, which reached into consumers' homes and businesses.
Glass and others at BT recognized that BT had to move away from
what was essentially a product-oriented software
architecture -- home phone service, business phone service, etc. -- to a
customer-focused one.
"We needed customer-centric systems. We needed an order-entry system for
all customers, a billing system, and a provisioning system." By designing
and building general-purpose services that could be invoked in the sale of
different products, BT started to cut down on its software overhead and phase
out older systems.
"You've got to design services in the context in which they
will operate," Glass adds. It's easy to come up with a billing service,
but will it be able to handle the 500,000 bills that need to be composed every
night by BT's billing system?
"You can predict what the level of performance will be. You
can design the service with that in mind," he says.
But all designs began with the customer experience team, which
thought about how existing and future customers would need to interact with the
service. "It defined what the customer experience should
be" rather than delivering it as an afterthought as part of a
product-oriented system.
The customer experience team simplified BT's sometimes complex customer
relationships into three phases. First is the period when the customer requests
a service, gets it, and starts paying for it. The second is when some issue
arises with the service that needs to be resolved. And the third is when a new
service is introduced to the customer.
By designing systems that can meet the needs of each phase, BT
avoided building the same systems over and over again. "We took designs
and held them up to the light. We asked, if we built it, how much reuse would we get?" he says.
BT reinforced its design discipline with bonuses. The new service
had to replace an existing system. Building a service wasn't enough. Bonuses
were paid only when an old system's "hardware was decommissioned and
signed off."
That doesn't mean all legacy systems disappeared. Many have been
wrapped and converted into services, but they function now as part of composite
applications and can be moved around to new hardware, in some cases closing
down the old monolithic system.
Neither adding new services nor closing old systems was the primary focus.
"The customer experience is the Holy Grail," Glass says. Build
services that match the needed customer experience. The other benefits will
flow out of your SOA project, he says.