Greg Filipkowski is director of enterprise architecture at American Electric Power, one of the largest power generators and distributors in the United States, serving 5 million customers in 11 states. Filipkowski is helping to lead the company's SOA strategy, which it embarked on early last year. He spoke recently with Optimize senior associate editor Derek Top.

Q: How did you start your service-oriented approach?

A: We started down the path to SOA opportunistically, first by building Web services and loosely coupled systems integration with WebMethods technology. For example, last year AEP became part of the PJM-RTO [Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland regional transmission organization], and we needed to integrate different functionality in our commercial opportunities and generation-services business units. We had more than 125 integration points within that project and were able to reuse 20% of those points with Web services, where we'd have one publisher and multiple subscribers.

Q: What have been the challenges?

A: Currently, we're doing SOA and Web services inconsistently throughout the organization. To overcome this, in the last six months we've focused on shoring up our development, delivery, and operations skill sets. This is setting the stage for a more comprehensive SOA strategy.

Q: What's the plan for a comprehensive strategy?

A: We're looking at our enterprise services to determine what business concepts are common among systems. But we're still a couple of years away from a full SOA model. For now, the first step is training the 50 to 60 business-planning folks in our organization about SOA. Because it's such a buzzword in the industry, if you ask 10 different people you might get 10 different answers. We need to define it locally and determine which business processes we want to continually improve.