Date published: 01.09.08 - not release date

Capita IT Services Standardizes on AmberPoint for the Driving Standards Agency's Self-Service Applications and Shared Services One of the First Full-Scale SOA Migrations in the British Public Sector

OVERVIEW

The Driving Standards Agency (DSA) of Great Britain is an Executive Agency of the British Department for Transport (DfT) and is part of the Driver, Vehicle and Operator (DVO) Group. The DVO Group has three strategic priorities -- better services for customers, better compliance and better value for money. In support of these priorities, the Group is developing a one-stop service strategy, focused on the needs of its private and commercial customers. Its goal is to provide more "joined-up" customer services, which make compliance simpler and which deliver significant improvements in efficiency and effectiveness.
Capita IT Services was originally awarded a seven year contract in 1997 to support the DSA’s IT infrastructure. As part of the contract, the company successfully developed and implemented the technology platform behind today’s driving test appointment control system. In 2004, a new contract was awarded for a further six years for the continued management of hardware and software as well as the development of a new IT system that will manage the registration of driving instructors.

A MAJOR ONE-STOP SELF-SERVICE INITIATIVE

As the outsourced IT services provider to the DSA, Capita is helping to enable the future direction and business changes required to meet these strategic objectives. Capita adopted a Centre of Excellence approach to enterprise integration, using AmberPoint’s SOA Management System and BEA’s AquaLogic™ for a major one-stop, self-service initiative. AmberPoint’s SOA software is at the heart of the DSA’s channel shift to online services and is an integral part of its move towards a services-based architecture to enable the sharing of data and business process through services with other agencies within the DVO. The project is one of the 1st full-scale SOA migrations in the British Public Sector.

“The DSA needed to deliver both new business processes as well as migrate to a new platform as a result of legacy and obsolescence,” said Neil Marley, Enterprise Integration Architect at Capita IT Services. “We also wanted to ensure we were meeting the strategic objectives of the Driver and Vehicle Operators Group, particularly with regards to the channel shift to internet-based self service and the wider agenda across other departmental agencies. We knew a strategy encompassing SOA to enable the required Enterprise Integration was the way forward in terms of delivering against these objectives, and that management capabilities would be critical to this effort. After a rigorous evaluation of SOA management providers, we selected AmberPoint for its architectural advantages and its comprehensive approach to governance. We adopted them as our SOA management platform of choice. AmberPoint delivers a services-based management framework very much in line with our approach of looking from above at the integration problem. By seeding and harvesting assets coming out of practice – projects done in the right way – over time your assets will grow and costs will reduce.”

AmberPoint’s software is based on the industry's first fully distributed architecture for SOA governance. Key components include agents, analytical servers and management consoles — all web services based and built from the ground up to operate in a distributed fashion. AmberPoint’s SOA Management System uses a ground-breaking policy-based management approach that helps organizations achieve better, more adaptive end-to-end control of evolving services-based applications. This is achieved by dynamically implementing policies in the runtime environment.

The DSA has a track record for taking the initiative in meeting IT objectives, and this project provides the DSA with the opportunity to take a further step forward and be one of the 1st Agencies to go live with its one-stop self-service applications for internal use, as well as external use by the general public, with the added ability for integration across other agencies in the department.

MOVING TO SOA

One of Capita’s first priorities was to address an obsolete technology platform. The platform DTCS was running on was being removed from vendor support. In addition, as the channel shift strategy had so far been met by tactical implementations, the DSA were compelled to replace their core application.

The DSA had already identified a need to address call centre volumes and increasing costs and moved forward with a channel shift strategy. This strategy centred on delivering booking services via the internet whereby the DSA commissioned a project to produce a web based user interface. This user interface was supported by adding a services tier to their existing booking application to expose functionality using web services. This approach allowed a .net user interface to be available via the internet that securely interacted with the call centre application in order to self serve practical driving test bookings.

“The DSA’s aim is to promote road safety through improving driving standards by testing drivers, motorcyclists and driving instructors through the theory test and practical driving test,” added Marley. “It also maintains the registers of approved driving Instructors, large goods vehicle Instructors, pass plus pupils, ORDIT, fleet trainers and supervises training for learner motorcyclists. By far, the main service it provides is booking, cancelling and changing dates for driving tests for the general public. With a demand level of 1.8M tests a year and candidates all learning at different speeds, the DSA is flooded with people continually phoning to find out if there are any cancellations – usually from teenagers who are keen to take their test. In the past, this has been handled by call centre agents, automated speech recognition and the tactical change to the DSA legacy application to surface elements of the booking business process to the internet. One of our objectives was to move the DSA away from a silo-based approach to a single, online self-service booking application that is easier to manage, monitor, share and use with ASR and IBS being an integral part of this phase of the migration.”

THE ROI OF SOA

“SOA can be easily misinterpreted and with some vendors pushing services based technology to the forefront of their offerings it is easy to jump on the bandwagon and get it wrong,” said Marley. “SOA requires different ways of working in order to have a successful implementation, however this can be overlooked and due to the shortage of expertise, organisations often attempt it without fully understanding it. This often leads to a traditional project approach to SOA which might well result in the delivery of an application that has services embedded in it rather than the delivery of services in an integration environment. This type of result doesn’t provide all the benefits of SOA. In fact, it would be much worse than a traditional application. You would end up with tightly coupled components that are difficult to maintain and deploy, the solution would in effect be legacy from day one.”

“By selecting AmberPoint as a management framework in the DSA SOA Backplane, we can be confident that even if other agencies choose a different direction for the monitoring of their applications, we will still be able to support a complex operational model,” added Marley.

Key Business Benefits:

•Meets the strategic objectives of the Driver and Vehicle Operators Group, particularly with regards to the channel shift to internet-based self service and the wider agenda across other departmental agencies.

•One-stop service strategy, focused on the needs of its private and commercial customers.

•More "joined-up" customer services across government agencies which make compliance simpler and deliver significant improvements in efficiency and effectiveness.

•Seeding and harvesting assets coming out of practice increases assets and reduces costs.

•Streamlined channel shift of demand level of 1.8 million tests a year – moved from call centre agents and automated speech to self service via the Internet.

•Moves the DSA away from a silo-based approach to a single, online self-service booking application that is easier to manage, monitor, share and use.

•Flexible support for future complex operational models, even if other agencies choose a different direction for the monitoring of their applications.

AmberPoint Management Capabilities

•Comprehensive service level management

•Logging and tracking of performance and availability data

•Reporting of performance, availability and compliance with service level agreements to management

•Real-time fault and exception detection

•Comprehensive fault and exception diagnostics

Technology Environment

•Web services developed in WebLogic and off-the-shelf services in JBoss

•Services deployed in WebLogic Server and JBoss

•Portal deployed in WebLogic Portal Server

•WebLogic deployed on Sun Solaris and JBoss on Windows 2003

For further info contact:

Vanessa Land
Devonshire Marketing (for Amberpoint)
Email: vanessa@devonshiremarketing.com
Tel: 0870 2407995