Gartner AADI - The SOA Journey presented by David Lindley

David Lindley from Blue Cross, Blue Shield of Florida presented their SOA journey. One of the many nice things they have done is to create some artifacts that outline their road map and vision. What's even nicer is that they come back to these documents to evaluate their direction and decisions. They have created service request documents, service contracts, documented their service life cycle and put architectural reviews in place for new services requests as well as change requests. The have an intermediary, a registry, a testing solution and a monitoring solution. They defined and published their standards, created development guides for services and even created an EA web portal for all of this information to be disseminated and shared.

This is of course merely the short list of all the work that David and his team have done. They have done a fantastic job of envisioning where they wanted to go and creating the necessary checkpoints and artifacts to get there.

I had the privilege of working with David early last year and while he and his team deserve all the credit for their accomplishments, I'm proud to have been a small part of their efforts. David and the other members of his team are a great example of what can be accomplished when a group of talented and passionate architects get behind SOA.

The other key success criteria required to achieve lasting benefits is enterprise support. It remains to be seen if this criteria is met at Blue Cross. For their sake, I hope they realize what a great team they have and what great work they have done.