A healthy integration

With more than 400 applications and dozens of systems, the IT leaders of Seattle, Wash.-based Providence Health System knew that integrating the company?s legacy systems, online initiatives, and data repositories would not be easy. But it took early integration ef-forts involving Providence?s CMS (content management system) and LDAP to drive home the tricky particulars.

A little while after we got the first few applications together, we realized this was going to become kind of an immense network of EAI, and the tools we had in house really weren?t going to meet our needs, says Mike Reagin, Providence director of R&ampD. It was like a one-off every time we were doing this.

Trying to extract data out of applications and systems and store it in a single repository was literally impossible over the number of systems we have, says Rick Skinner, CIO of Providence. So he turned to Web services in June of 2002. Using Infravio?s Web Ser-vices Management System and with efforts of about a dozen in-house developers, Providence had the initial implementation running in about three weeks, says Skinner.

The Infravio tools give Providence interoperability between Java and .Net environments, offering more independence for development and deployment. It also helps manage Web services deployment, security, and versioning, says Reagin. Nevertheless, the Providence developers have been kept busy: Six core integration projects have been completed be-tween the June rollout and November, including the CMS, integration with a third-party ISP that provides health and wellness tools for Providence?s Web site, and an LDAP da-tabase and directory service for all content and security on the site plus hand-written Web site applications.

We?re using Web services in new kinds of ways all the time now, adds Skinner.

Indeed, the benefits have gone beyond integration tasks: Using Web services shortens de-velopment time and application maintenance time. According to Reagin, Providence has seen approximately a 30 percent increase in time to market with new applications, be-cause Web services allow high code reuse, much more than we?d experienced before. And as a result of the code reuse, the company has seen a reduction in hardware and software requirements.

Reagin notes that because Web services are still a new technology, advance planning for concerns such as security and management is essential. He expects that, due to the high code reuse and tendency for versioning the spinning off of slightly different versions of a Web service developers will require better management of existing Web services and code.

In the beginning, you?re not going to be bothered with [management issues], Reagin says. But once you have 100 to 200 Web services deployed out there, then management becomes very important. Getting management tools in early is key.

The next major focus will be to enhance the types of information and services available on Providence?s public Web site, pulling together data across all of the company’s re-sources, from insurance information to details on interactions with a person?s doctors, says Skinner.

We?re in an industry that wants to get more efficient, be higher quality, and improve cus-tomer service. Those are pretty fundamental goals, and our only hope of being able to achieve them is to use technology to do it, Skinner adds. One of the reasons [those goals exist] is because of how labor intensive we are and how little we have made use of technology.

Skinner and Reagin feel prepared for the challenges Web services will bring. We have no false perceptions that any technology is the silver bullet, says Reagin. Skinner sec-onds that, Based on our experience, Web services are one of the few ?best practices? in terms of integrating information from many disparate systems. But the second piece of advice I have is that even with these Web tools, it takes talented, motivated people to build [Web services technology]. This just makes a good organization even better.