SOA makes it easier for ADP to create new services and sell them to its base of nearly 500,000 payroll customers and 70,000 time and labor management customers.
I’ve always been an advocate that an organization should strive to have a consistent UI (user interface) brought forward to the end user of any application. But the fact of the matter is that you have to have the back end infrastructure available to bring the applications forward on a consistent platform before you can create single instance UI (portal) on the front end. This is where SOA comes into play.
ADP’s service-oriented architecture also lets it offer employers services through products sold by other companies. “It allows us to attack verticals that we otherwise couldn’t get at, because we’re partnering with a company that has strong software that’s attractive to that market,” Bongiorno says. For example, ADP sells its payroll services to customers of Microsoft’s small-business accounting software and is talking with ERP vendors about similar partnerships.
ADP’s SOA infrastructure consists of 6 pretty normal components as described by InformationWeek:
- Common user experience. A single user interface provides a common look, feel, and behavior for its employers’ services offerings.
- Single secure-identity services. Lets users gain access to a number of programs with a single password. The use of Security Assertion Markup Language, an XML standard, lets customers gain access to ADP apps from their own systems.
- Secured data gateway. ADP offers customers and other business partners a secure gateway for the exchange of data, whether it’s between machines or between users and machines.
- Highly configurable portal. Provides a common entry point to access ADP and third-party products. Individual ADP products function as portlets–small windows of content appearing on users’ screens–that extensively employ Web services between the portal and back-end legacy systems, such as the registration of a new employee.
- Central message hub. Designed using Open Applications Group standards and employing IBM MQSeries middleware, the hub effectively synchronizes information from various databases, such as data on an employee who might be identified in one database by first name and last name, but in another database by first initial and last name.
- Common reporting services. Uses a real-time extract, transform, and load tool and an internally built data catalog that generates reports with a common look and feel throughout the enterprise. Users open a tab in the portal to select the data to be reported. ((Chabrow, Eric, September 12, 2006. “ADP Writes More Than Checks.” Retrieved from InformationWeek.com on October 27, 2006.))
For more on ADP SOA, see this.
4 responses to “ADP on SOA Leading Edge?”
Good story on ADP – but reading thru it in detail, seems like implementation of SOA architecture across ADP’s organization and services is a long way away.
No question this is the right approach – but it is something easy to discuss and very difficult to implement in such a diverse organization.
I was in a sales meeting with ADP the other day and was actually quite surprised at how far they have built out their infrastructure. Clearly not all the way there in National Accounts, their web services and integration infrastructure is pretty deep. Not only that, ADP has actually decided to build their own data warehouse in-house and now has reporting capabilities across a variety of applications. One of these days if I ever see a demo or technical white paper, I’ll write more about it.
Someone tell the customer!
Having worked for ADP and with ADP as a strategic consultant I can tell you that the customers have no idea and have seen no evidence of this SOA. The other day in a presentation I had 26 ADP customers in a room and none of them…NONE of them were on the same product. It was clear to me there was one similarity among the group. All were on a product that allowed them to have ADP go gross to net with a payroll check. That is ADP’s business (one of them) and as long as Americans keep getting paid ADP will keep getting paid (at least 30% of Americans) Obviously the rest are paid using that processor the business already owns.
I am always suprised to see ADP act as a “technology” company when they are not. They are Automatic Data Processing. That is what they do. They don’t create unique applications any more than they tie what others have created together into a unified UI. They do things that keep the payroll checks processing (for the General Services business). Don’t get me wrong, I love ADP. The stock helped me buy my first home 15 years ago and continues to rack up college points for my kids.
I do, however, roll at the thought that they are out there in front of the pack in HR technology. They have HR in as much as it is REQUIRED to sell payroll processing. They figured out long ago that HR had the budget and payroll would be taken for the ride. I am also grateful for this strategy as companies I talk to that have been on ADP for 10 plus years in HR/Payroll are popping into my life all the time. All of them ask me why 70% of American companies use a software package (as oppossed to a service) to produce and manage payroll and HR. I ask each of them how their personal net worth would look if they rented the house they live in 10 years ago and then just silence…. Sure we need renters but then we grow up and want some equity in our investments. If ADP really had good technology and had that as a driving goal instead of earnings per share then two things would happen. They would produce really good HR Technology and I would sell my ADP stock and buy Paychex!
Thanks for the great site!
I love it.
Todd Asevedo SPHR
Todd:
In general, you are absolutely correct. All things transaction processing are the key, and if ADP ever tried to switch to a licensing model rather than a cost per check/user/transaction model, I’d also sell all my ADP stock. (I probably own all the HR stocks, even the ones that perform pitifully).
The SOA environment I think is strictly being rolled out in National Accounts. This is where clients are more used to pushing the envelope. So while Enterprise HRMS is still a fairly mid-market HR solution, ADP has needed to tie that into their other services so that larger clients without the needs for a robust HRMS can still have things like single sign-on.
I love the statement at the end though – and I agree. The day ADP gets out of highly transactional payroll processing and benefit enrollments, that’s a good day to sell all your stock.