It’s vital to ensure a balance between business and technology needs from the get-go.

Another great article about our ecenter story and our SOA approach published by InfoWorld, based on a great interview from China Martens made last week (link, pdf). The article is also mentionned on java.net.

Some abstracts (strange to quote myself ;-).

“One thing to understand is that the implementation of SOA takes time, it’s a journey,” Didier Beck, the head of eBusiness Center at Helvetia Patria, said Wednesday.

He cautioned against rushing headlong into an SOA deployment. Instead, he suggests a company spend time at the start of the project to come up with a vision followed by a road map with milestones for what it hopes to achieve both technically and in a business sense with the deployment. It’s vital to ensure a balance between business and technology needs from the get-go, Beck added.

Goals for eBusiness Center included speeding up application development and promoting reuse of common components. Helvetia Patria also wanted to be able to develop applications that could then be used by a variety of distribution channels such as the Web and intranets instead of having to write applications separately for every channel.

Helvetia Patria went live with its first application developed based on eBusiness Center in February 2002, according to Beck. Since then, the company has put in place four to six new applications per year, he said. Development times for new applications are now between four and eight months, making development two to three times faster than was previously possible.

Update: the same article from China is also published at ComputerWolrd Australia (link, pdf).