4.0 - The Challenge and its Importance

4.1   - The Issues

The Government of Canada is in the midst of a transformation on a scale never seen before.  This transformation involves engaging the citizenry more fully while at the same time becoming more cost effective and efficient with the resources it currently has and consumes. As well, the citizens of Canada want to see their government as a seamless portfolio of services that reinforce one another and together combine to deliver the outcomes that meet their needs.

The federal government has placed a huge emphasis on horizontal service delivery and citizen centric service delivery. Linking together vital initiatives such as: Services Canada, the Service Transformation agenda, Horizontal Service Delivery, Common Administrative Services and IT Shared Services will depend on this coordinated and integrated approach to “Service Orientation”. 

These are clear directives being handed down as a by-product of key initiatives like Results for Canadians. It is now more imperative than ever to address the demand for consistency and interoperability across the government as more and more services require information from multiple sources.

Increased interoperability among all services will be critical. This cannot be achieved with the current collection of non-homogeneous products, tools and applications in the technology landscape. The implication is that large-scale changes will be needed to make this level of interdepartmental synergy possible.

With the amount of duplication and overlap federally and multi-jurisdictionally, coupled with the inherent complexity of many government programs, SOA can have a valuable streamlining effect.

To successfully achieve this service-oriented vision, there must be a consistent way of defining and implementing services across the federal government. A proven way to do this is, to create all services like a set of interoperable business components that can be flexibly mixed-and-matched to cost effectively achieve the desired outcomes and deliver on the many mandates of government. Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) makes it possible to deliver on this promise in a practical manner. 

4.2   - The Value of SOA

One of the key goals of a service-oriented design is to cut through the current information silos, promote interoperability and enable services to be delivered more effectively and uniformly.  SOA adoption has the potential to erase the barriers that separate the business and technology sides of any organization, dramatically improving productivity, and increasing overall harmony and agility.

The heritage of SOA is admittedly one of technology; as such industry has consistently agreed that the value of SOA is found in its ability to:

• Facilitate the manageable growth of large scale enterprise systems;
• Provide a simple scalable paradigm for organizing large networks of systems that require interoperability;
• Minimize trust assumptions among providers and consumers to further promote greater business agility and autonomy; and still
• Integrate functionality across ownership boundaries.

Canada chooses the broadest interpretation of ‘system’ such that it encompasses all aspects of a business. The role of SOA in business planning is highlighted in section 4.3.

SOA certainly has traction in the IT field as evidenced by Gartner’s prediction that “80% of software development projects will be based on SOA by 2008”.

Service orientation is not in itself a solution to domain problems but rather an organizing and delivery paradigm that enables one to get more value from both the use of capabilities which are locally “owned” and those under the control of others. It also enables one to express solutions in a way that makes it easier to modify or evolve them.

Service Oriented Architecture has the ability to extract, create and expose services from pre-existing or legacy applications. Broad swaths of companies have already put themselves on the path to SOA; this includes IBM, Microsoft, BEA Systems Inc., Oracle Corp. and SAP.  Much like modern vendor products and their components, new applications can expose services in the same way. The impact to the monolithic and single purposed applications of the past is to increase their useful lifespan, maximize the government’s return on investment and potentially reduce any immediate needs for obsolescence due to potential problems in interoperability and non-compliance.

The private sector and other governments have repeatedly demonstrated the benefits of SOA. The adoption of SOA in accordance with the GC SOA can greatly extend the reach and value of existing services, streamline processes, and generate measurable improvements in the efficiency and effectiveness of departments and their service delivery capabilities.

4.3   - The role of the GC SOA

The GC SOA is a reference architecture, which includes a series of SOA concepts and models specifically tailored to the needs of the Canadian Federal government.  

SOA is widely known in the information technology industry as a proven concept; and is widely accepted as a best practice for information and technological design. More recently, the concept has been extended to encompass business elements.

CIOB takes this latter perspective and views SOA as a valuable approach to organizing services in the business realm in addition to addressing the usual technological benefits. By broadening the scope of SOA to also encompass the business levels helps to ensure department can interoperate to deliver a more agile, effective and efficient government overall. The interconnected aspects of Information Technology (IT) systems delivery and information sharing are simply the downstream result of the service-oriented business transformation.

To achieve the best results, SOA must be used in a consistent fashion.  The GC SOA reference model is quite precise in the use of specific layers and the need for GC-wide interfaces throughout the middle layer. These are GC specific extensions designed to ensure the greatest benefits from SOA in the federal landscape.

To this end CIOB is publishing the "GC Service Oriented Architecture" (GC SOA) to offer clear guidance in the use and adoption of SOA across the federal government. Using the GC SOA, the Government of Canada’s services will be highly reusable and fully interoperable from the higher-level business concepts, to their supporting technical components. The result is greater efficiency, more consistency, minimal duplication and less overlap across the entire enterprise.