Monday, May 28, 2007

SOA and the Swiss Railways - or another reason why processes aren't everywhere

I've just come back from a very pleasant little trip to Switzerland with the family (family friendly doesn't sum up the country... even the TRAINS have play areas!). The Swiss train system is rightly world renown for its punctuality and co-ordination, we had 4 trains to catch to cross the country (Google Earth map) and the changes between the trains were 10-15 minutes at each of the stations.

Why is this relevant for SOA? Well here is an example of an incredibly efficient batch system which is based around time synchronisation and which therefore is able to move large numbers of people successfully around. A "real time" process based solution would be the car. Start at A, do lots of steps, arrive at B. But with the railway system, which is much more event based, is able to achieve the same end game (indeed there are parts of Switzerland where cars cannot reach) but do so in a way that reduces stress and increases efficiency.

So when you are looking at replacing those old Batch processes which look so inefficient, ask yourself whether they are batch processes because that is all that could be done, or whether you have a Swiss Railway implementation that you are about to replace with a butt ugly SUV.

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2 comments:

Unknown said...

Your conception of batch is very different from what an IBM Cobol developer thinks of as batch. Trains moving from point A to B are online, real time activities.

How is that a batch process?

Steve Jones said...

The people on the train are the batch process. So instead of a real-time single person (event) based approaches you are shifting people in bulk from one process to another.

Basically its the difference from doing car to car transfer and using trains.