Do you remember when the promise of broadband was so close but you just could not get it?  The communications company had pulled the fiber to your local area, but you just had to wait until that bandwidth was available to you.  Well, the banking industry is in the same space.  Banks have spend the better part of 5 years working on cross channel initiatives eventually settling on Service Orientation as their approach to address the problem.  However, IT in banks has spent a ton of resources both in $ and people to develop these services but have not delivered any noticeable innovation to the people writing the checks for all this work.  The branches (stores), ATM, Call Centers, IVR and web have basically not seen the benefit from a user perspective…as yet. 

Integration in the early days was all about integration at the data tier, which was great...but all you had was data and you lost the behavior that went along with that data.  Once SOA became popular, the promise of delivering both data and behavior was very enticing and proved a slam dunk for service to service integration.  However, it left much to be desired when it came to human interaction.  As a UI developer when presented with a WSDL, it is often trial and error to get the right experience to effectively work against the actual intentions of the service.  This get compounded with each additional service that is introduced into the human interaction.

Composition is the next level of integration to address the gap that exists between services and the end user.  Whether it is a Web 2.0 mash-up, a SmartClient, Mobile or Office Business Application…composition provides developers and architect the opportunity to extend their intent for a service (data, behavior and human interaction) into the story.  The great news is that we have started to tackle the complexity in service creation and UI composition with the recent P&P factories (http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices).  The next step is to look at further industrializing these factories to specific industry scenarios...

The last mile will soon be crossed…