<<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.>>
You can read this at:
http://www.ebizq.net/industrywatch/eii/795.html
Gervas
