Frontline: Camden Council and Red Hat Consulting

Camden Council says working with supplier Red Hat has not just built a new flexible integration platform, it has re-skilled its development team to be able to truly build for the future.

 

“In order to provide our citizens with the best possible online self-service experience, we recognised the need to integrate the various departmental systems and infrastructure,” said Francois Mounier, integration and development manager, at the London Borough.

 

“However, we wanted to take a mature approach to integration, abstracting the business function from our technical architecture. Therefore, we wanted a technology architecture that would be flexible, easily maintained and cost effective.”

 

The team’s aim was to find a more efficient way of providing citizen services online within a cost sensitive environment and extend the lifespan of existing line of business (LOB) applications by transitioning from an end-to-end to a more agile and re-useable, integration approach. 

 

The answer seems to have been following a path of “only integrating what you need”, it seems. Essentially, Camden wanted to create an ecosystem with its current service outsourcing partner that would deliver a flexible interface and to avoid future expensive exit costs for changing outsources in the future, using an SOA (service-oriented architecture) approach.

 

Camden has been working with red Hat for a while, but this new phase of work has encompassed a much more strategic partnership level of agreement, say both parties. In order to provide vendor independence, Camden Council stated from the outset that any strategic partner should need to train its in-house team of predominantly Java developers to manage integration and provide flexibility in the sourcing of future projects. And this process started with interfacing the back office system for its Street Environment Services, e.g. waste management and street cleansing, with the soon-to-be supplier management information system (MIS). 

 

The SOA approach to integration allowed the Council to agree on the solution architecture, interface and integration to ensure seamless operation, as the project runs alongside the supplier’s design of the MIS.

 

Camden Council brought on-board Red Hat Consulting services to provide specific expertise in Red Hat solutions, as well as knowledge and experience in implementing integration projects. Red Hat Consulting mentored the in-house team, scaling up Camden Council’s existing resources to enable the development and execution of similar projects independently moving forward.  

 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux provided the base for the business integration with JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, including JBoss ESB and JBoss Operations Network, which provided message brokering and monitoring respectively.

 

The implementation of the project was over an eight week period, encompassing the architecture, development, testing and delivery. Camden Council and Red Hat achieved delivery of the solution through a joint partnership approach, creating architectural blue-prints along the way for future deployments.

 

Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform is now the core platform for which the Camden Council can deliver its business integration vision. After completing this first phase of the project, the Council will begin to tackle more complex transactions, leveraging the JBoss Enterprise Business Process Management (BPM) BRMS capabilities of the platform.

 

“JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform has provided a product set which allows us to implement our business integration vision, which from an architectural perspective, is vendor agnostic,” says Mounier.

 

“The use of open standards avoids future vendor-lock in.”

 

Camden says it now has an in-house team that will be able to deliver the next phase of its business integration project, rolling out three ambitious projects in parallel.

 

Ultimately, this will lead to the Council gaining an architectural maturity, allowing it to rapidly deliver complex projects.

 

“Our team’s service philosophy is to start small and think big, and the business integration project is a testament to this approach.