HK Housing Society opts for Oracle to build SOA infra

By Enterprise Innovation Editors | Dec 1, 2010

 In order to build its service-oriented architecture infrastructure, the Hong Kong Housing Society has selected Oracle Enterprise Repository, which will reduce its software development costs by as much as 25%.

The organization aims to reduce its software development overhead costs by 15-25%, boost quality and speed up its application development through better governance on web services operations and management of security and operations policies.

Set up in 1954, the HKHS's mission is to provide affordable housing and related services for the people of Hong Kong. It is a pioneer in many areas, including the use of information technology to fulfil its social goals and rise to new challenges.

Last year, the HKHS' seasoned IT team began looking for a reliable way to outsource the development of software applications. That meant being able to clearly define and articulate its enterprise architecture to vendors, then easily deploying, managing and reusing the assets the vendors create.

Oracle Enterprise Repository is the core element of the Oracle SOA Governance software solution. An industry-leading metadata repository, it provides a solid foundation for delivering governance throughout the service-oriented architecture (SOA) lifecycle by acting as the single source of truth for information surrounding SOA assets and their dependencies.

Oracle Enterprise Repository provides a common communication channel for the automated exchange of metadata and service information between service consumers, providers, policy decision points, and additional governance tooling. It provides the visibility, feedback, controls, and analytics to keep SOA on track to deliver business value. The intense focus on automation helps to overcome barriers to SOA adoption and streamline governance throughout the lifecycle.

Oracle helped the HKHS to develop a three-phase roadmap, using Oracle's industry-leading SOA methodology. It covered four key disciplines including the governance processes, a tools infrastructure to support the governance process, a reference enterprise architecture and data architecture.

To start execution of the first phase of the SOA roadmap, the HKHS acquired rights to use Oracle Enterprise Repository, a truly 21st century approach to software development, in March 2010. The first step will be capturing a detailed picture of the information assets the organization already has and identifying the traceability relationships between them. Oracle Enterprise Repository offers a host of benefits, including minimising the risks inherent in older software development models.

Migrating away from the old "stove pipe" packaged application development lifecycle where the functionality in a newly developed application was often duplicated across many applications by different vendors' offers, the HKHS is on its way to building a solid enterprise architecture coupled with good data management targeting to partition the common information already available, freeing application vendors to focus purely on providing unique capabilities or value for a specific system.