SOA, a Business Facilitator
Thursday, September 27th, 2007This might sound shocking coming from a CTO, but SOA isn’t about technology, it’s about facilitating business. Of course all of IT could be viewed that way. I go deep into SOA projects in financial institutions on a regular basis and I find many of them initiated and driven out of IT, but with little initiative, support, even awareness from the business of SOA. Most of the time it boils down to mere education, but whatever the case if an SOA project is purely IT, there will likely be a struggle.
I see metrics reported like “components reused” (don’t get me wrong, that’s a good metric, I report on that metric for SunGard internally as well) but there needs to be business context around it in order for the business to comprehend the value (for example, I include revenue generated, projected, etc. for each component, as well as some subjective attributes like revenue that wouldn’t have otherwise happened without SOA).
Last week I was with a customer whose SOA project is in trouble. My interpretation of their situation is very simple… IT has little to no involvement from the business in their SOA effort. They took the approach that the SOA “technology” could be inserted at a layer beneath what the business sees (i.e. the apps and functionality mapped to the business doesn’t change, and the SOA is inserted beneath, abstracted away). Requirements are written almost exclusively by system analysts and no benefits were exposed to the business. The project started failing when the business noticed service interruptions and other unexpected problems. That’s completely the wrong way to go about it.
I routinely state that the process is more important than the technology, and here I’m throwing business direction, support and even leadership into that category as well. The successful SOA’s have a core team working in a federated way with each business lead and their teams in an organized and collaborative manner, taking direction from the business and exposing value “chunks” little-by-little along the way.
