SOA driving business and it alignment: using process to translate business views into technical realities

DEMONSTRATING VALUE

IT organizations have been struggling to transform their mentality into more of a business services infrastructure. Initially, SOA meant Web services and feeding eXtensible Markup Language (XML) messages around business processes and data stores. However, an almost universal shift has occurred as business organizations now demand that IT people translate SOA into terms of how it can be leveraged to meet business objectives and not just be another cool toy at the disposal of engineers. To that end, IT organizations have answered the call and are meeting business in the middle. In a recent survey of Chief Information Officers (CIOs) at large financial services firms, nearly 70% indicated they were actively hiring program and project managers in 2007 (see Figure 1: Hiring in Program and Project Management).

FIGURE 1: HIRING IN PROGRAM AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Source: Survey responses

IT people are trying to teach a new language to business people, but customers are already thinking in many of the SOA concepts. It turns out the people who have been demanding educations are the IT people. They recognize a need to understand the business in greater detail so they are not run over and pushed aside.
Governing the process of communication is part of the equation. Business analysts, program managers, and project managers serve as the bridge between the business and IT. SOA initiatives are fostering a new language between each unit as specific business functions break down into individual services. As firms mature in their SOA implementations, shared services begin to mirror the business process structure in the lifecycle of financial transactions.

REINTEGRATED COMPUTING

Because SOA has become such an integral part of the overall business strategy, senior executives are starting to reign in the technology and put in some controls around creating and sustaining services. Over half of the firms surveyed indicated they would be implementing an SOA governance system in 2007 (see Figure 2: Firms Implementing Governance for SOA).

FIGURE 2: FIRMS IMPLEMENTING GOVERNANCE FOR SOA

Source: Survey responses

Governance processes involve connecting the business roadmap to the IT infrastructure and finding an appropriate balance between growth and maintenance. Old systems need to be supported, and demands are high for new functionality to remain competitive and/or compliant.

For those who are uncertain about applying governance practices, the two biggest inhibitors to adoption tend to be culture and lack of skills. Many firms lag behind culturally due to a lack of understanding or buy-in from senior management. To solve those issues, people who can communicate both business and IT objectives are being placed in senior positions with new titles like Chief Data Officer, Chief Risk Officer, and others. However, when prompted, we found only 23% of firms were placing someone in a senior position to manage data integrations from a corporate perspective.

Similarly, skills challenges continue to crop up at many firms. A lack of understanding about effective governance has lead to many of the leading vendors establishing consulting practices to teach their version of governance. Likewise, governance has been a key strategic concept of leading consulting firms that have been engaged to help manage the process. From a technical perspective, effective engineers continue to be in high demand. Of those surveyed, 77% of senior IT executives indicated they would be hiring more developers in 2007.

Between program management and skilled developers, lifecycles have been shortened to meet business objectives in faster, more incremental rollouts. Several of the firms we interviewed indicated they were still on large 18-month development cycles, which are common in enterprise rollouts. However, the major change is that projects have been divided to provide quarterly releases to meet immediate business needs in advance of the completion of entire applications.

stly, many firms are putting in core systems to manage the onslaught of Web services generated by all the development. Nearly one-third of firms were planning to implement an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) in 2007 (see Figure 3: Firms Implementing an Enterprise Service Bus).

FIGURE 3: FIRMS IMPLEMENTING AN ENTERPRISE SERVICE BUS

Source: Survey responses

ESBs serve as the technical traffic cop in the middle of the SOA street. They monitor services, identify renegades, and create a common law for things like authentication, data access, and other processes that can be standardized for reuse. Coupled with an effective services repository, they reduce the maintenance impact on new applications, which continue to burden IT organizations from legacy applications.

CONCLUSION

SOA is not the acronym of the current computing era the way dotcom was in 2000 or client/server was in the 1990s. However, SOA means much more to a business than any of the previous and popular computing acronyms. SOA means fostering effective communication between business and IT. SOA means delivering applications to meet business needs faster and with the requirements business users demand. The focus on governance means a balance between capability and reasonability. Governance is the proverbial ping between those who are using applications and those who create them to ensure the communication is monitored, reasonable expectations are set, and accountability for business success is spread across each person in the development lifecycle. SOA is creating the language people use to translate ideas into applications from every corner of the business.