To hear Bob Brown tell it, the story of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s move toward service-oriented architecture is more about culture than technology. Brown, senior staff member of USPTO’s software development and maintenance organization, has been guiding the agency toward SOA. Like many other organizations, USPTO is adopting a software development method that calls for the creation of software as a collection of services.

The SOA approach aims to create shareable services that organizations can rapidly deploy to address their needs. Benefits include greater adaptability to change, easier integration with older systems and savings through software reuse.

“We were trying to break up our stovepipes like everyone else and create shared services and get into a more amorphous environment,” Brown said. “And hopefully, with that, break down the walls and reduce the lines of code you have to manage.”

An alphabet soup of software development and data management standards points toward the most common SOA path: Extensible Markup Language, Web Services Description Language (WSDL), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI). The human dimension to SOA has fewer guideposts, however.

“The biggest problem is not technological — it’s political and territorial,” Brown said.

The political considerations stem from SOA’s nature. The approach aims to eliminate barriers between isolated applications, creating services that organizations can share across boundaries. Such far-reaching efforts may face resistance, mostly about budgeting and control, industry analysts say.

“The challenges are always cultural,” said Anne Thomas Manes, a vice president and research director at the Burton Group and Web services expert. “One of the most challenging aspects to putting together a SOA adoption plan is figuring out how to resolve these cultural issues.”

Accordingly, industry and government groups are looking into the organizational impact of SOA, developing recommendations and defining best practices.

SOA spells better coordination
USPTO develops about 20 software services per year, Brown said, and commercial products add to the services population.

USPTO’s pursuit of SOA began in 2003. Agency developers had started to create services, and technology managers decided that a more formal process was necessary to coordinate their efforts, Brown said. He said the agency has adopted an incremental approach to SOA rather than an enterprisewide deployment.