Hi Guys-

We are leaning into the weekend, huh? Still lots to be done before the clock winds down.

Here is an interesting piece from Forrester Analyst Dennis Gaughan, on the overall impact of Service Oriented Architectures and Effective IT.

We have begun noodling the SOA to CMMI to ITIL to CobiT linkages, and how it applies to a Process Framework view of running IT better.

Dennis’ approach is good common sense–the faster the parts move, the more critical it will be to have effective planning and process controls in place, enterprise wide.

Have fun out there,

Don Casson

OA Changes the Nature of Innovation for IT
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Dennis Gaughan

One of the most common IT governance inquiries we get is: How to do we start shifting focus toward the value that IT delivers and away from the cost of IT? The role technology plays in creating innovation for its enterprise customers is a major element of that discussion. For example, developing software that lets salespeople identify their most profitable customers, or an automated portal that slashes the time it takes to bring new suppliers online.

IT does play a role in automating innovative business processes, Now, the technology to do that is largely based on service-oriented architectures (SOAs). SOAs promise improved speed in bringing these new abilities to market by increasing the reuse of existing assets.

The evolution to SOA, while extremely exciting, will create necessary change in the current operating model for many IT organizations which are not organized to support this new, more fluid model. The impact will be especially acute across the following areas of IT governance:

• Investment planning - The current model for evaluating potential investments is usually split into two processes: one for big new investments, and one for smaller ongoing requirements. SOA’s compartmentalized development model essentially combines those two notions: where nothing is ever 100% new, but assembled from existing and new. This will force a change in how we build the business case for these investments; how we prioritize; and how we measure benefits since most current portfolio management processes are designed to support long-term projects and will not support the higher volumes of investment candidates.

• Software development - Traditional software developers are like craftsmen, carefully building all of the pieces of a product so that they fit well together. SOA development is more like an assembly line, where the focus is on putting together standard components to create new things. SOA will essentially put the craftsmen on the assembly line, working on discrete services and assembling them with existing internal services or even third-party services. Testing models will also need to change to support distributed composite apps that may span multiple companies’ service repositories.

• Change management - SOA will create an environment in which change is more dynamic since you can update one part of the composite application without breaking the whole. Better automation and control of the change process as well as new standards for version control are necessary.

• Maintenance and operations - SOA will change the way we manage our applications. It?s relatively easy to monitor an application today when it is well contained within a known set of infrastructure. A composite application will potentially be distributed across the infrastructure and even outside the firewall where you have little or no control on the performance characteristics of a service.

• Security - A new model for application security will be required as well; one that respects the security inherent in the existing applications that are exposing services, as well as a layer that maintains that integrity across the composite application.

So yes, SOA will affect almost all aspects of IT. And while these potential problems do seem daunting, there are things that you can be doing ahead of your own SOA adoption that will make this transition easier, such as the following:

• Improve processes - Evaluate the maturity of important processes that span the IT organization (like change management, resource management, and incident management). Companies are investigating best practice frameworks like the IT infrastructure library (ITIL) to give them a consistent process definition and language to improve the effectiveness of these core processes.

• Improve demand and portfolio management - The imbalance between demand and supply in IT will always be an issue and SOA is only going to make it worse by increasing end-user expectations regarding speed to deliver. One of the best ways to deal with this is putting a process to better manage demand. Learning to say no to things based upon real business information may be the most important competency a service-centric IT organization can have.

• Clearly define an enterprise architecture - The last wave of computing change (from client/server to Internet) threw the discipline of enterprise architecture out the window to focus on the promise of internet computing. That left many IT organizations with expensive applications sitting on the shelf, or applications that don’t interoperate well due to a lack of a broader architecture vision. Don’t make the mistake again. A strong architecture will help ensure that you can maintain the agility that SOA promises while adapting to meet changing business requirements.

• Business service management - Your business customers are increasingly thinking in terms of business processes or services. If you manage IT infrastructure in terms of servers and routers, you can?t relate their performance to how your customer views the world. Start defining and managing the key services that IT provides, and measure IT performance in the context of those services.

These are just a few examples of activities that will help an IT organization make the transition to an environment based on SOA. Currently, the technology around SOA is getting most of the press and hype. But it will be these culture, process, and organizational dynamics that ultimately determine the success of SOA in most organizations.

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