The three magic questions of business SOA (and IT Strategy)

Having a chat with someone today I was reminded of a presentation I gave a few years ago. I went to the client knowing that they'd spent a lot of money in the last few years on an IT "refresh" and the word SOA had been used rather a lot. The programme wasn't seen as being a success and the business were bitching that money had been wasted.

My opening point was that the business was sort of right and so I posed three questions

1. Do you have a clear vision of where you want your IT estate to be in 3 years
2. Do you want the IT estate to reflect that vision
3. Do you want the costs for IT to reflect the different values in that vision

The answers were "No, Yes, Yes" which wasn't a huge surprise but was my real point to both sides of what had turned into a political mudslinging competition.

IT had set off to try and do 2 and 3 without knowing 1 and the business had effectively said "we don't know what we want... but we know its not that". Neither of these was a good idea. So the focus therefore was on creating that vision (a business service driven vision) and doing the heatmap that meant IT could then align itself (number 2 and 3) to that vision.

Now I've said before that IT and Chairman Mao have a lot in common but there is another famous phrase that applies here

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step"

Now that might be true, but its really important to know where you are going otherwise you look like a bit of a pillock in a thousand miles.

So can you answer the three magic questions of Business SOA and IT strategy?

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture

Simple IT - a proposal

I've been thinking more and more about why Simplicity is hard and I've come up with a few key things that Simple IT needs to be and how you judge Simple IT. Part of this links back to the SOA anti-patterns and it comes down to a few key questions

1. Can your IT estate be described as a series of discreet elements
2. Can each of these elements be easily maintained within their business context
3. Can each of these elements be simply described

This comes down to that old principle of "one thing well", in IT this doesn't mean low level services, it can be very high-level services, for instance putting in an HR system which does everything that the business wants in a vanilla package solution would meet all of these requirements. HR is in fact a single discreet element and its delivered via a single package, this matches how the business wants to manage that area.

So the building blocks of a simple IT strategy are not all of the same size, they are of the size that makes sense within the context of the business architecture

In a simple IT approach the focus is always on the on going evolution of the IT estate in line with business strategy and not based on a single project delivery. The way IT is set up tends to focus on the The Ivory Tower of Implementation Optimism v Long term viability which drives against simplicity and towards complexity.

So the focus of simple IT is to value

Long term evolution over short term expediency

Architectural clarity over coding efficiency

Business Strategy over IT strategy

Simple IT is also to

Drive IT costs in-line with their business value

Drive IT technology selection in-line with the business value

Create clear upgrade boundaries between different business value areas

Manage IT based on the different business value areas

The point here is that simple IT is not actually about making a single project faster, its about making the 2nd project and its support faster and more efficient. This means having control and direction into which the right approaches can be used, Agile where its about value creation and reaction, package where its about standardisation and SaaS where its about utility.

This is about having the business architecture, having the heatmap, and then aligning IT clearly into those areas.

Simple IT is hard, it requires control, it requires vision and it requires focus.

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture