Mini Case 2.2

1. What are the major reasons the company had to use SOA?
The basic idea of SOA is to reuse and reconnect existing IT assets rather than more time consuming and costly development of new systems. In TrueCredit case, the company needs to quickly develop applications to maintain its competitive advantage, and SOA offers the solution. SOA helps the company to develop new applications more efficiently, to support more simultaneous users, and to decrease application response time.

2. In what ways did they gain competitive advantage by using SOA?
The competitive advantages are listed as below:
a. The application can support big amount users at the same time (50,000 in 2006 vs. 25,000 in 2005). The application makes users feel comfortable and reliable about the company’s service.
b. The application improves response time to less than a second (down from 3 seconds). This advantage corresponds to customers’ wants, the quick service.
c. SOA helps the company to adopt new applications more quickly, from 180 days or more to 90 days or less.

3. What specific “services” can you identify in a business like this?
The services as creating credit report for customers, informing customers the latest changes for themselves, and some other applications are offered by the company.

4. Why is it so important to serve 50,000 simultaneous users?
Most customers who go online shopping are looking for quick and convenient services. If the company’s services are time consuming, customers would switch to the competitors. By the way, if the company cannot serve more customers, the scale of the business is limited.

5. Classify this application using the material in Section 2.2.
I would classify this application as Expert system (ES). ES provides stored knowledge of experts to non-experts and decision recommendation based on built-in expertise. TrueCredit offers personalized explanation based on individual’s credit score.