IT Engagement Model

One of the key ingrediance for success is clearly defining the roles and responsibilities within IT. There are multiple stake holders in IT with each doing their best to provide the highest level of support to the business. Most of the time this results in people stepping over each other - especially as there generally is a not a clear definition of everyone's task. Most of the project failures are due to the confusion is the definition of the roles between the PMO, Project Manager and the Enterprise Architects, resulting in resposiblities overlap and lack of making decisions. Gartner has produced an excellent job of defining the IT engagement model at a very high-level and is independent whether organizations adopt SOA or not.

SOA - Development Organization

The benefits of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) are not only reducing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by reusing service, streamlining business process, etc. - it also reduces the total number of resources required to adopt SOA enterprise wide. The SOA - Development Organization shall generally be identical to the deployment model and by distributing the tasks by the tiers IT organizations shall need fewer very skilled resources (Presentation).

The Architecture Framework lays the foundation for the enterprise and the Agile Project Management enables large organizations successfully manage and deploy SOA enterprise wide. Without adopting either - the traditional (structured) development methodology and process does not enable enterprises achieve the full benefit.

SOA - Focus Areas

Following are the 8 SOA Focus areas that Executives need to consider while adopting SOA.

1. Governance & Organization
2. Standard Bodies
3. Regulation & Compliance
4. Management (of Programs, Projects, Services, Infrastructure, etc.)
5. Security (could be considered as part of management - best broken out seperately)
6. Business Process
7. Development tools and Methodology
8. Deployment tools and Methodology

Based on my discussion with BEA there are 4 Organization patterns/models (listed in the white paper available at http://eudownload.bea.com/uk/events/soa/soa.pdf). These models could be considered as:

Centralized, Hierarchial, Federated & Partially Federated and these models are typically structured the same way the Enterprise is organized. For example is the business is highly-centralized - then so is IT. This structure would typically not change for adopting SOA across the enterprise. Forrester has an excellent research paper on this - which you may want to download from their site.

It is easier to achive the reuse benefits of services in a centralized model. The issues for non-centralized (most large enterprises) organization is the structure/process required to get the benefits of reuse. The missing solutiuon for this is a centralized Service Repository with a Google like search capability. To make this a productive tool - every project manager & business would have to comit to document and publish their objectives, process, requirements, design, etc. (all the sharable assets) into this repository. Such a respository will have to leverage technologies such as Search (Goole Appliance, Autonomy, Verity, etc.) & Conetent Management Systems (Documentum, Interwoven, FileNet, etc.). Ofcouse - Microsoft provides similar capabilities but have not reviewed their products.