The word 'enterprise'' - industry’s confusion, a blogger’s bliss
When an idea of ‘ the Infosys Blog for SOA’ was proposed, obviously I was very much excited. Then, came the million dollar question: where do I start a discussion on SOA or what becomes an interesting or valuable discussion in today’s ‘Service Oriented IT Universe’?
While I was contemplating on the above question privately, I had a discussion with one of our potential clients that indeed provided the answer to my own question.
The question: The context of discussion goes like this: after listening to our hour long presentation on SOA and Infosys SOA service offering, one of the participants asked “The presentation is quite interesting; you have a structured and insightful approach in realizing SOA. But, tell me; here, you are suggesting to execute activities and to create artifacts at an Enterprise level. What do you mean by 'Enterprise'? Is the entire group [of companies]? Is it the entire company? Is it the whole ecosystem including customers and partners of one company?”
The bigger question: It quickly came to my mind that I did hear a similar question may be one week back, for the n-1 th time. After promptly responding to the participant’s query, I noted an action item for me to take broader look around this question; also, to make this as the first topic for the SOA discussion.
Why this question? In today’s IT industry, each and every stakeholder has his/her own understanding and view point on SOA. These stakeholders include business managers to IT managers, product vendors to system integrators, program managers to programmers, technology analysts to Wall-Streeters.
Under this situation, the organization entrusts a team of SOA practitioners, either external consultants and/or own employees, in answering the first question “SOA-what's in it for us?”. After going through some discussions/activities, then encountering numerous obstacles, often teams realize that the question is quite difficult to answer. Why it is so difficult? Because the difficulty lies in the question itself; more precisely, nobody has defined the objective personal pronoun i.e. us.
The answer: In a SOA context, ‘us’ is a combination of people, processes and technology. They come together to provide the ‘real services’ [offered by the organization to its customers]. Any answer [=SOA Strategy], without the sufficient emphasis on each of these constituents is destined to face only challenges.
Depending on the organizational drivers [aspirations, opportunities, pain points, threats…], organization need to prioritize [and reprioritize] the ‘real services’ that need to have the qualities of Service Orientation. The definition of ‘us’ [=people, processes, technology] around these ‘real services’ becomes the locus (location of focus) of a SOA for the defined time frame; and also becomes the definition of ‘Enterprise’ for a SOA initiative.
The importance of the question/answer: Once the above definition is created, the terms such as a) technology needs for SOA b) communication strategy for SOA c) Enterprise SOA adoption Roadmap d) Process Services in SOA and so on, becomes quite quantifiable and controllable. And on the other hand, any initiative without the definition of ‘enterprise’ is a natural candidate for a premature demise.
-Binooj Purayath
Comments
One important facet of SOA as distinct from other memes for loose coupling and standards-based integration (read CBD, CORBA etc.) is the notion of some amount of central planning and as you correctly point out having an enterprise focus. The process of SOA is about breaking down existing applications / technologies and organizations and re-factoring them to be better aligned to business processes. This cannot be achieved by setting some rules of evolution and waiting to see what the outcome is. Rather, there is the need to direct the course of evolution using some sort of a blueprint. This design of such a blueprint must have enterprise scope and must be top-down. There is the risk of taking on something this large and being able to drive micro-processes of actually developing the services. That is a huge challenge for SOA, nay any enterprise architecture effort. The tendency of EA groups (who typically develop this blueprint) to isolate themselves from reality and sandbox themselves into irrelevance is what needs to be overcome. We have seen the perils of centralized planning in economics.
Posted by: Kingshuk Dasgupta | August 14, 2006 03:17 PM