Darren Wesemann Blog

The biggest shift I see is the (finally) holistic view many IT organizations are taking regarding their systems and infrastructure. Consolidation of redundant functionality is being architected into common components and standards are being placed on core infrastructure, such as the message bus, the application server, and a few others. The purpose appears to be business needs such as:

- Adopt flexible, enterprise-wide computing strategies that facilitate tighter integration with customer processes and give customers more visibility to their data.

- Move from a organization-centric to a customer-centric approach where disparate business processes are consolidated and automated for greater efficiency and customer satisfaction.

- Integration with customers and other community members in order to deploy new services to customers faster for increased revenues.

From the technology teams themselves, they appear to have additional reasons in the consolidation trends, such as:

- Reduce delays, errors and inefficiencies in integrating internal lines of business and applications on a single architecture to unlock information trapped in the back, middle and front offices.

- Allow multiple, secure and integration points into the organization for ubiquitous access and collaboration from anywhere.

- Address business requirements with solutions that match the technology to actual business needs so the organization can extend visibility and efficiency across real-time interactions with trusted partners.

Both the business and technology sides appear to be in sync with respect to a common architecture in many cases. Adopting the consolidated strategy however is going to be challenging for these organizations, to say the least. Here are some of the trends that appear to be resulting in some measure of success in our customer’s environments:

- Lower expectations related to service-enabling all existing systems. Leverage business knowledge and expertise to identify core functionality required, and start with those systems.

- Consider what is in place that can be leveraged, and make use of if where possible.

- Process, governance and procedures are necessary to ensure success.

- Deliver incrementally, start small from a delivery perspective, but always consider the entire system from a planning and design perspective.

- Act immediately, start now and leverage agility to ensure deliveries are small but regular and incremental. Begin with pilot projects and move on to more complex projects from there.

- Collaboration with business stakeholders is critical, instead of trying to discover, define, rationalize, etc. functional requirements from solely a technical perspective.

- Use a single place to post/register/manager/etc artifacts such as documentation, interfaces, code, and tracking information.

- Spend some time determining the most relevant security policy.

- Pick an asynchronous message bus and stick to it. This will take care of how messages will be sent or received among services and applications, and will save tremendous time because non of the low-level integration that had to be done in the past (like opening sockets and formatting messages) has to be worried over.

- Make use of a dash-board solution for monitoring the health of the services.

At the end of the day, SunGard customers are taking things one-step-at-a-time, but with an overall view of things globally, so that each choice is made in the context of the overall system, yet implemented in phases or steps.