UK local authorities believe that service-oriented architecture (SOA) will play a key role in the future of IT, but there will be no easy transition.

Leeds City Council is changing the IT within its organisation to mirror the alignment of services, information and processes taking place under its One Council programme.

Leeds has a large number of application technologies from different suppliers. But there is a need for integration and interoperability between these technologies, and it is turning to SOA to help achieve this.

To avoid high costs and long-term sustainability issues, Leeds intends to consolidate the technologies and suppliers used.

“Reuse is a significant driver for IT in Leeds to save costs, increase the speed in which solutions are delivered, join up processes and information across the council, and increase the pace at which we react to change,” said Dylan Roberts, chief information officer at Leeds City Council.

“But our applications infrastructure approach to reuse is not just about SOA, it is also about reusing application components.”

Leeds has identified specific areas where SOA is the right course of action.

“We are not taking an enterprise approach to SOA adoption because, along with the rest of local government, we do not have a sufficiently detailed approach to enterprise architecture,” said Roberts.

“Our approach is incremental development of services, taking into consideration what we think the requirements may be, which means some may need adapting.”

The work at Leeds is not the only example of SOA adoption in local government.

Newcastle City Council is integrating council tax with customer relationship management services, and several councils are outlining their own visions.

Richard Steel, president of local government user group Socitm and chief information officer at Newham Council, said: “Newham is considering SOA. Web services make service integration and component reuse
increasingly practical.”

Glyn Evans, corporate director of business change at Birmingham City Council, said: “We’re SAP-dependent and SAP will not be fully SOA-compliant for another two years or so. I would guess that SOA would play an important role in our three-year Customer First rollout programme.”

On the whole this will be a drawn-out process, say experts. And the ambiguity around the definition of SOA makes it hard to establish who is truly using it.

“Service orientation needs to be distinguished from SOA. There is no blueprint that says ‘this is SOA’,” said Neil Macehiter, research director at analyst Macehiter Ward-Dutton.

“The public sector is coming to service orientation in a much more business-focused way. Public sector organisations work from the top down, but it’s the opposite with business.”

He added: “The bigger discussion around SOA in local government is still to come.”

Applications infrastructure approach at Leeds Council

Leeds’ approach has seven domains: applications integration; knowledge management and use; enterprise business applications; security infrastructure; data infrastructure; enterprise intelligence and system/application development.

Benefits:
Reusable technology components to deliver the different priorities of the council.

Increased value from IT investments.

More flexible working arrangements.

Shorter development times and reduced costs.

Increased agility boosts the opportunities for organisational change.

IT can deliver solutions faster.

Business decisions can be made based on fact as data from several computer systems can be combined for analysis.

Performance can be tracked against targets, while methods for achieving improvement can be identified.

Processes and information can be integrated and automated across services.

Modern collaboration tools will help councillors and staff connect to people and knowledge across the organisation, and with partners.

Reusability will significantly reduce the council’s carbon footprint, compared with the multiple technology supplier equivalents.