<<This post, by Robert Swanwick, was brought to my attention by Brenda
Michelson courtesy of her followup post. In the first post, Robert
describes a situation of a company that has historically operated as
autonomous business units, each doing what was best for their own
customers, including each building their own web channel. As they
tried to incorporate more customer contributions into those web
channels, he states that "they sought to build a common platform." He
didn't provide additional details on what common means, whether it was
shared customer presence across all of the web channels, or if all of
the web channels were consolidated into one. He goes on:
However, the autonomous business units lived on. Because they are
quite independent, they are constantly seeking to diverge in order to
meet the specific needs of their customers. At the same time IT
continues to work towards increased centralization. As you can
imagine, this is creating some tension.
A service oriented architecture (SOA) with shared web services and
appropriate SOA governance might be their salvation. If IT can control
the main architecture and help facilitate the sharing of approved web
services, this firm may be able to get the centralization they need
while allowing for business units to meet their own customer needs.
Personally, I think there is a risk that SOA could muddy the waters in
this situation. I do agree that this is a governance problem, however,
it's not SOA governance, though, it's IT governance. Based on the
description provided, it doesn't seem like there's any immediate
business desire to consolidate the channels to the customer or to stop
viewing these units as autonomous. The second governance question is
more about the goals of IT. Why is IT trying to centralize everything
and strive for commonality? Are solutions not being delivered on time?
Are IT costs running wild? If they are, and these costs can be tied
back to the redundancies that exist across these autonomous units,
then the governance board needs to determine which of these competing
goals, business autonomy or IT cost reduction, is more important. If
the stakeholders decide that IT cost reduction is more important, then
there's a high likelihood that SOA is going to help achieve that goal.
If the stakeholders choose that business autonomy is more important,
an effort to adopt an enterprise SOA is going to continue to be in
conflict with that desire and may do more harm than good. Individual
business units may want to run with SOA within their domains, and IT
may be able to take it a bit further under the radar, but keep in mind
that those efforts would not be in support of the stated business
goals. In other words, even though there may be opportunities where
SOA could be applied, if it puts the stated goals of the organization
at risk, that's a problem. I would encourage the leaders of this
organization to first read Jeanne Ross' excellent book, IT Governance:
How Top Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior Results, to
assist in getting their priorities straight. I also address how the
priorities of the business must be factored into your decisions around
SOA in my own book on SOA Governance.>>
You can read Todd's blog at:
http://www.biske.com/blog/
Gervas
