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Experts Share Solutions for Agile Enterprises
Expert panel shares their successes implementing enterprise architecture and SOA.
by Lauren Y. Dresnick

Enterprise Architect Summit, May 2006

 Listen to the audio! (Running time: 58 minutes)

Riccardo La Rosa, Principal Consultant, Molecular

Peter Varhol, Principal Product Manager of Developer Tools, Progress Software

Prashanth Ajjampur, VP of Enterprise Architecture, The Hartford Financial Services Group Inc.

Leading industry executives Prashanth Ajjampur of The Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. and Riccardo La Rosa of Molecular presented stories about real-life enterprise architecture (EA) to a packed crowd at Enterprise Architect Summit 2006 in Key Biscayne, Fla. Moderator Peter Varhol first encouraged attendees to share their own stories, asking, "How many of you implement Web services as part of your service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy?" More than half the attendees raised their hands. It was telling sign, for SOA and Web services were the common thread of success throughout the various EA strategies revealed during the discussion.

The Hartford Story
Prashanth Ajjampur, vice president of enterprise architecture for insurance provider The Hartford Financial Services Group Inc., went into great detail explaining the legacy architectures that exist in his 195-year-old organization. He joked, "Sometimes I believe that our IT systems are also 195, but they're only about 40." Ajjampur continued, "[the company] has many lines of business, ranging from personal auto to workers' comp. Each [line of business], over time, has built its own systems."

As you can imagine, The Hartford EA group faces many challenges. "[The Hartford] has one of everything," Ajjampur explained, meaning it has a major mainframes operation, various client servers, N-tier functionality, and more than 150 Web services. And, every technology operates on a different platform. "We have a plethora of platforms," said Ajjampur. The Hartford's legacy architecture is also plagued by silo development. "We've built every functionality that's required to run an insurance company many times," he said. "We have redundancies in functionality, platforms, [and] infrastructure."

This redundancy caused a major financial strain on the business. "The business was telling us that IT was too costly, and IT wasn't even providing The Hartford with all the functionality it required," Ajjampur said. He said that at one point, 70 percent of The Hartford's total cost of ownership was going toward "lights-on" IT maintenance.

But in the last couple years, The Hartford's EA practice has matured considerably. "We have a centralized EA group that reports up through the CTO. [It] is responsible for not only enterprise architecture—blueprinting and strategy—but also project architecture, large-program architecture, a shared services group, and user-centered design," Ajjampur said.

How has Ajjampur's team accomplished all this? They conducted a study, and "looked at the metrics around [their existing] applications." They gathered data to reinforce their claims, and discovered their problem: "[It] wasn't that we didn't have adequate functionality and technology; it was that we didn't have enough flexibility in our systems." About a year ago, they presented this data and a four- to five-year solution to the business, which was headed by a CTO who understood the complex world of IT. The result of this discussion was "a very large strategic initiative, where for the first time, we're able to realize the business capabilities required to be successful on a go-forward basis."

SOA and Web services play a large role in The Hartford's EA strategy, said Ajjampur. But he considers them a "means to an end," not a solution. Ajjampur and his team use Web services primarily to add flexibility to the silo applications, or monolithic architecture. They have used SOA and Web services to transform "static aggregation of content at given point in time" to "dynamic aggregation of functionality," or a mashup. He concluded his presentation by emphasizing, "SOA [and Web services] are not the magic bullets that are going to solve everything. But they are an enabler of change for us."

Molecular's Tale
Riccardo La Rosa, principal consultant at Molecular, started his portion of the discussion by asking the audience: "How many of you are still involved in coding—either looking at it or [using it] in development?" About half the attendees raised their hands. La Rosa responded, "I'm going to discuss the coding side of the implementation that I developed for [my client]," a high-tech manufacturer that Molecular has been working with for the past eight years.

First he provided a brief history of his client company, an organization that acquired dozens of "very similar" applications in the booming '90s. The crossover among applications caused a redundancy problem, similar to the challenges faced by The Hartford, he noted. La Rosa also mentioned that much of the conflict had to do with different ways of coding applications, using languages that were not compatible. The impact of this redundancy wasn't felt until 2001 when the economy took a nosedive, said La Rosa. His client organization was spending 60 percent of its resources simply maintaining its legacy application before his team intervened.