The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know about Information Technology

5.7. An Example: Shipping 'R' Us

Imagine that you are the CEO of an international shipping company; let's call it Parcel Express. You are in the business of shipping parcels around the world, and you own a giant fleet of trucks, thousands of warehouses, and hundreds of airplanes.

For any given parcel, one of your employees may need to know, at any time, who sent it, whom it is going to, what is in it, how much it weighs, who is paying for it, where it is now, and so forth. All of this information is privileged, but there are widely diverging classes of privilege.

The fellow driving the truck might need only to know where a package is going and how much it weighs. The sender might need to know where her parcel is, but she probably does not get to know the name of the truck driver responsible for it right now. And so forth.

It is not hard to imagine dozens, maybe even hundreds of entities within and without your company that would have a legitimate need to interact with data about that parcel.

SOA would essentially enable you to merge and streamline the processes, share data fluidly, and reuse the existing software within each system.

With SOA, sales, marketing, and finance would have access to the same customer data. Operations and customer service would be able to check the status of open orders. Finance and account management would have access to credit and accounting data so they could customize their tactics for handling late-paying customers.

Of course, there is a lot more ...