Oct 16, 2006
Service Oriented Architecture- Leveraging Technology to Reduce Costs
By Scott Smith
Sales and Marketing Engineer, Fiserv Output Solutions
Recently, at the HealthCare Communications Forum in Boston, Personix presented a session entitled “Portals - Powering Self-Service & Competitive Advantage”. As we researched material for the presentation, it became clear that Self-Service Portals increasingly are utilizing technology and components of an emerging trend known as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). As SOA is an integral piece within the movement to make information more accessible to customers, we’d like to briefly revisit Self-Service Portals and discuss the importance of SOA in the future of online communications.
Self-Service Portals have proven to add significant value to companies delivering solutions to customers over the Internet. In today’s Internet-savvy world, many companies are deploying Self Service Portals. These Self-Service Portals find acceptance in Human Resources (HR), employee management and customer services.
By providing employees a tool that satisfies many of their HR needs, companies are able to significantly reduce internal costs. Those savings include reduced call center and administrative expenses. Dell Computer Corp, saved $2.5 million the first year after implementing a web based HR system. Hewlett Packard was able to reduce it’s HR related infrastructure costs by 30 % with the adoption of a web based HR Self-Service Portal. Additional benefits to companies deploying internal Self-Service Portals include increased management productivity and higher levels of employee satisfaction.
Organizations are finding that Self-Service Portals directed at customers, members and account holders not only reduce costs, but also contribute toward end user satisfaction and retention. Health Plan Providers typically provide members the ability to view personal health related information, such as EOBs and check remittances in a secure environment. By delivering this data over the web, companies significantly reduce print and mail costs. When this personal health information is coupled with the ability to link to other web sites, access FAQs and even order prescriptions on line, it’s not hard to understand why providers would want to deploy Self-Service Portals.
Likewise, providers of mutual funds, 401Ks and other financial services are able to leverage Self-Service Portals to their benefit and that of the account holder. Access to financial statements in a secure environment, email notification and on line enrollment are just a few of the benefits for this industry.
So how do Self-Service Portals relate to SOA? Self-Service Portals owe a great deal of their appeal to underlying tools that support the concept of SOA. Those tools include SOAP or Simple Object Access Protocol, XML or extensible markup language and HTTP or Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. For the purposes of this article, we won’t focus on what those technologies are as much as why they are beneficial to an organization’s IT department.
The benefit of Service Oriented Architecture, as opposed to Traditional Architecture, is that applications that can run independent of architecture and operating system. The applications don’t care if they run on Windows, Unix or Linux. Because they utilize SOAP, XML and HTTP they are not tied to one computing platform.
By leveraging this technology companies can:
- Adapt to change more easily
- Link disparate applications together quickly
- Support heterogeneous computing environments
- Reduce operating costs
SOA is a natural outgrowth of the open systems movement, which, arguably, really began to gain momentum with the popularity of the Linux operating system. Linux is an operating system very similar to Unix, which was first released in 1991. It has grown steadily in popularity and acceptance since then and is extremely reliable, stable and much more secure than Windows. Key differentiators between Linux and Unix are that Linux runs on a wider variety of hardware than Unix and is much less expensive than commercial releases of Unix.
In 1994, the World Wide Web Consortium was established with the goal of defining standards for the Web. Also known as W3C, the Consortium has been responsible for recommending standards of communication and information exchange. W3C members, staff and technical experts work together to insure that the Web will continue to thrive and that companies will be able to leverage technologies which are independent of hardware and operating system restraints. Thanks to the W3C SOAP, HTTP and XML were established as recommended standards in the 1997 to 1998 timeframe. Today those standards have gained popularity and acceptance.
Companies who leverage these technologies, are able to invest their IT dollars in a more cost effective manner than if they would when purchasing more costly proprietary solutions. Organizations that adopt SOA will find themselves well positioned to compete in the evolution of services and solutions delivered over the Internet.