IT as a Catalyst for Optimal Business Outcomes

Since this week brought the eBizQ's SOA in Action conference, I decided it was time to dust off a blog I posted a few months ago that I still believe rings true when thinking about how to make SOA work for business results, not just cool technology...   Here goes:

We all know the economy is tough right now and tough times call for delivering results and cutting to the chase.   We've seen the temptation to focus myopically on fighting fires while potentially slowing progress on strategic and innovative initiatives.  With that in mind, I might just as well pack up my SOA, Cloud Computing and Web-oriented bags and say that "it's time to just give up and take a holiday."  But I remember the words of Gandalf the Wizard in Lord of the Rings...

"So do all who live to face such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."

- Gandalf to Frodo, in the Mines of Moria

In my opinion, difficult times are opportunities to cut through the chase and get to the core of what works with new technologies and their specific benefits.  This post focuses on four key blatantly obvious "insights" I've gleaned from two in-depth posts on SOA Best practices, SOA Governance and Cloud computing.  Both posts can be found on Dana Gardner's Briefings Direct site.  

1. Obvious Insight #1:  Don't SOA before you know what you are trying to achieve.. SOA needs a plan that can be measured, tracked, course corrected so that you know when you have reached your goal.

Tim Hall, Director of SOA Center at HP Software in a recent Dana Gardner BriefingsDirect Podcast summarizes this well by saying "The whole thing is tracking your progress, where are you in this (SOA) journey. It's not about installing a new pack of middleware and then declaring victory. You really have to measure along the way what you are doing, and how far you have gotten. Some measures that people start off looking at are things like number of consumers per service, a measure of reuse."  I'd like to add other key measures such as time-to-service or time-to-change.  I'm also evaluating whether lifecycle velocity (which is slightly different than time-to-service as it measures individual stages in the lifecycle) can be useful.

2. Obvious Insight #2:  SOA only works when IT silos play nice together.  Cooperation is absolutely required the SOA to succeed.

Again from Tim, "One of the things that we are seeing more and more of, as we're going deeper into the end of 2008 and looking forward into 2009 and the spread of adoption over the last seven years, is that new constituents come to the table. They ask, "What's the lifecycle of this service?" We've got this group of people who are now testing the service. How does that relate to its status for promotion into production environment? Shouldn't they get a say as to whether the service should or should not be promoted, based on the results, be it functional, performance, or security testing? They absolutely should"

This implies that you will best achieve your SOA goals and expected results by enabling IT to work collaboratively..

3. Obvious insight #3 - What you learn with SOA applies to your entire IT enterprise architecture

Another key quote from the blog, "So, the surprising thing for me is that the lessons that we're learning, that are specifically being applied to SOA right now, have more far-reaching implications. As we look at things, like the different compositional patterns for systems that are coming -- Web 2.0 technologies, Ajax, rich Internet applications (RIAs), putting front ends on some of these things, or cloud computing -- all of these things are interrelated. My question is, should we not be applying these fantastic concepts and activities that we have been establishing through SOA governance more broadly to support all of these different types of next-generation composition"?

4. Obvious insight #4 - Take your IT lumps internally first... SOA is the best learning environment to prepare for the Cloud, and SaaS in the future

A final thought from Tim , "...we'd better start doing some formalization of those relationships internally, because you never know how long that relationship is going to last. It may be internal today and it may be external tomorrow. You'd like to have the ground rules be relatively consistent, as you move from one model to the next."

So pragmatically speaking, I see these insights as effective to course correct a SOA stalled or going off track.   Make sure you have a plan that you can track, measure and use as a guide to your SOA goals, don't push forward with a SOA initiative until your organization and culture will support IT teams playing nice together - SOA and silos are like oil and water, take what you learn from SOA and realize it applies across all of IT and use that to your advantage, and consider SOA the best test bed for future cloud computing and SaaS initiatives--I will have a follow-up blog digging more into this space:  Cloud and SOA.

Are these insights useful?  I would encourage a dialog and sharing of other key, even obvious, insights... SOA's not easy (another obvious statement) and SOA requires a deep breath and commitment to tackle messier issues - organizational dynamics, culture, cooperation, but that inherently is where the largest value lies.  The tools automate and the architecture guides, but it's ultimately the IT organization that delivers the solution and in times like these, getting to the solution is the true measure of success.