Pepco Holdings, Inc.: Service-Oriented Architecture Governance

Accenture helped Pepco Holdings Inc. (PHI) use service-oriented architecture (SOA) to enable a sweeping business transformation aimed at integrating its numerous businesses. With Accenture’s help, Pepco Holdings has rolled out three SOA-related organizational structures that will help the company with numerous challenges in the future and ultimately position it to achieve high performance.

PHI is a holding company whose subsidiaries operate regulated utilities and/or sell energy products and services. Businesses that compose PHI provide electricity and natural gas to almost two million residential and commercial customers in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It also includes Conectiv Energy, a subsidiary that manages power plant assets and buys and sells fuel and energy in the deregulated wholesale marketplace; and Pepco Energy Services, which provides deregulated energy and energy-related services, including thermal-energy solutions, outsourcing strategies to reduce energy costs, electricity generation, renewable energy and energy-performance contracting.

PHI is in the early stages of a business transformation that will ultimately involve consolidating customer information silos among the company’s numerous businesses.

PHI’s company managers identified service-oriented architecture as a key strategic initiative that would assist in combining new applications and systems with Sun Microsystems’ Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS).

One of the core drivers for SOA adoption at PHI is that an increasing number of software vendors are exposing features and functions as services, resulting in a need for PHI to understand and establish standards for how to optimally use, design, develop and implement services that support the business.

Some SOA-related benefits PHI plans to achieve in the coming years include code reuse, greater efficiency, the harnessing of Web services to support new systems, improved management of larger data volumes and the ability to monitor energy consumption by the hour or in real time using smart meters.

Accenture collaborated with PHI for 10 weeks to address the company’s enterprise architecture, integration and business process architecture needs.

Together, the Accenture and PHI team established SOA organizations along with reference materials, standards and tools. Prior to the 10-week project, Accenture conducted a six-week study that culminated in an 18-24 month SOA roadmap that PHI is now using to guide its future plans.

Developing SOA organizational structures, in combination with reference architecture, standards and methodologies, involved the disciplined effort of PHI executives and technology managers and the deep knowledge and expertise of Accenture’s Technology Architecture team. “Accenture helped us navigate a vast amount of information related to SOA and grow increasingly focused not on SOA as a technology, but on the achieving the business benefits that will enable us to become a high performance business,” said Aretha Calloway, IT manager and SOA lead at PHI.

PHI and Accenture successfully rolled out three SOA-related organizational structures—the SOA Steering Committee, the SOA Governance Group and the Services Operational Group—that will help PHI with numerous challenges in the future.

The establishment of these structures will make PHI’s SOA governance process more stable, sustainable and better led. To expand SOA adoption and to deepen the company’s SOA maturity, the organizational structures were combined with nine tools that form the foundation of PHI’s SOA program. PHI and Accenture developed these tools across areas that include approaches, considerations and recommendations around SOA journey management, communications planning, training curriculum development and financial sustainability.

As for next steps, Accenture will work with PHI to accelerate its realization of high performance by developing and conducting initial SOA training so PHI will learn more about Sun Java CAPS by working with an on-site subject matter advisor. In addition, Accenture has recommended communicating SOA program goals and governance processes to appropriate PHI audiences, launching request for proposal processes for key sub-projects and enlisting SOA design and development project support where needed.

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