Sustainable SOA and "Closed Loop" Thinking

From MWD: Todd Biske of Momentum has a great blog on SOA and EA, and one of his recent posts chimed particularly with something we've been talking about for quite a while now - sustainability. This is a theme that NeilM and I and Jon (and also Dale, our partner at Freeform Dynamics and book co-author) - have been developing throughout 2006 for our book on IT-business alignment.

The idea of sustainability isn't really rocket science but it's a vital touchpoint in the process of strategic IT thinking. What it means is that it's not enough to think about technology in the context of solving a problem or addressing a need that you have today. To deliver sustainable value from IT you have to think about how technology will continue to address your needs going forward. Arguably this was a key challenge that contributed to so much disillusionment surrounding the Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) boom in the late 1990s and early 00s: EAI technology was great at fixing tactical and existing problems (how can we synchronise key customer data across these x systems? etc) but because of its sometimes esoteric (and certainly non developer friendly) nature a lot of the technology couldn't really support a strategic shift around how *new* capabilities should be developed to make integratability a "baked in" feature. A better balanced forward-looking approach to integratability (not just integration)is of course one of the things that makes SOA so interesting.

Todd's post is talking about how IT so often looks at things from the point of view of a set of discrete and disconnected events - and one particular piece grabbed my attention in the context of SOA:

"IT produces solutions, and then forgets about them unless a user complains or some alarm goes off. If an organization takes on SOA, but still operates with this mentality, the only thing that has changed is that they are producing services instead of applications."

It's more fundamental than that though.

A focus on service delivery (which for us is what SOA is really about) is a focus that is predicated on closed-loop thinking. A service is something that is experienced over a period of time by a consumer, not just a capability that you've built. I'd say, then, that if you work with the mentality Todd talks about then you're not even producing services - you're producing itty-bitty applications. The concept of "service" - a consistent experience provided to a consumer - is what underpins that evolved, closed-loop view. Without it you're not doing SOA.

This means that SOA is only possible when you consider the whole lifecycle of services over time as they are created, changed and (yes) retired. And that's where sustainability comes in. If you're not thinking ahead to how you will deliver that consistent experience you're not thinking in a sustainable way. You're thinking about point projects, point applications, point functions, and that's how we got into the mess we're in.

Importantly this shift in mindset to think about how to deliver sustainable business value from IT takes us well beyond the world of technology product procurement. It's all about process, practice, organisation and culture and nothing to do with whether you bought the blue or the red ESB.

Without this understanding at the top of your mind as you embark on SOA or indeed any other IT initiative (unless it's responding to a *very* opportunistic and short-lived requirement) entropy will always win. If you're always looking backwards then the reality of business requirements and the reality of IT capability will quickly diverge in unwelcome ways.

Click to view more