Michael Hugos’s recent post “Use Cloud, SaaS and SOA to Earn a Seat at the Table” stirred some thoughts in my head about how SOA can help bridge the divide between the business and the techies. There was a time when IT projects were driven from the technical engine room of an organization or by external consultants. This is no longer the case as now the business will generally fund and drive IT projects.
I have heard many non technical business people complain that they feel they have no control over projects as they don’t understand what ‘the techies’ are talking about. In many cases, projects go on for months if not years and the result at the end is less than satisfactory. In some cases, the results are simply not what is expected while in others, the reasons for the project in the first place no longer exist. The problem here is that many people feel that IT projects are ‘different’ and should be run in a different way. Let’s look at how a standard business project, such as a project to run a marketing campaign, is run and how similar principles can be applied to an IT Project and in particular how using a Service Oriented Architecture will help
Project: Run a Marketing Campaign to Attract 1,000 new Customers
The CFO has provided a budget to run a marketing campaign to attract 1,000 new customers. As with all projects, there must be a strategic goal. In this case, the goal is to attract 1,000 new customers. The first part of the project will be to look at the options available to run the campaign. There are number of options available:
- Design an advertising campaign and run this on various media.
- Use a tele-marketing company to call the target market directly.
- Build a Web Site and work with a Search Engine Optimization specialist to attract as many hits as possible.
The choice of which of these to use will very much depend on the product and the target audience, however, there will be similar steps to all
- Each will have an element of a base fixed cost to create the materials for the campaign plus a variable cost that will be used to actually fund the campaign.
- An initial trial of the campaign will then take place using limited amount of the remaining budget.
- If one very lucky and this works well first time and attracts the requisite number of new customers relative to the spend, you are likely to do more of this as on the basis that it will reach or exceed the goal set.
- More often than not, things don’t always work well first time and the campaign or channel selected will have to be tweaked until the right combination is found to bring in the required number of new customers.
The main point of this is that this project will be driven based on results; you spend as little as possible to get a result. When the results aren’t good, you stop, think again and then try again until the right approach is found. Only then do you ramp up the amount of money to be spent and push forward with the full campaign.
Project : Use IT to Reduce the Time to Complete a Specific Business Process by 50%
Again there is a strategic goal here to use IT to reduce the time to complete a business process by 50%. An example of how this might be achieved would be by changing a manual process to a computer based process. The bottom line is that to reach the strategic goal, when implemented, this business process will take 50% less time thus meaning twice as much work can be completed or 50% less effort is needed than was previously needed. Only the organization can assess the cost/benefit of implementing an IT system so the budget for an IT Project can only be set on that basis, however, using a Service Oriented Approach, the project can be run as follows:
- Based on the ultimate goal, break this down into smaller pieces. In terms of SOA, this would mean defining a number of ‘Services’ (the ‘S’ in SOA) that that the project requires.
- The creation of each ‘Service’ will provide a result so take one service, and plan to implement it using a number of different possible technologies to see real results in your organization.
- There are many SOA oriented software products available today that enable you to try at little or no cost to see if it fits your purpose. The best way to determine if a product will work for your requirement is to use it. If there appear to be a number of products that fit the bill, implementing one service with each of them will soon highlight the positives and negatives that are associated with each.
- If you are lucky enough that this works well first time and everyone is pleased with the result, replicate what you have done using the chosen product with the other services noting the results as each service is created.
- In most cases, it will not be what you wanted:
o Perhaps there are small issues and it can be tweaked to make it work as you want
o It may even highlight a flaw in the target goal.
o Perhaps the technology chosen doesn’t live up to expectations
o Perhaps you need to go back and start again
- At the end of the day, the previous cycle needs to repeated until you see a result that is what you want. Only at that point do you commit more resources perhaps developing the other required services in parallel but only when you have proven results with a small subset (i.e. service) that will be required as part of the overall strategic goal.
As with all projects, the results will not always be good or positive, however, it gives you the means with which to correct any issues at the earliest possible stage where previously IT Projects could run for months and years essentially building on problems that occurred very early in the project. SOA allows you to take an approach that provides a high degree of business involvement and control of the project. SOA enables the IT group to deliver results quickly and the business people can work with the deliverable to see if it fits their needs.
Now the business people in your company have the same ability as they have on other projects (like the marketing project mentioned earlier) to monitor progress and exercise control. This will make them more comfortable with IT projects and thus more likely to fund IT projects. Skilful use of SOA is what makes this possible.
The “SOA Gateway” is a product that can be extremely helpful to help achieve such control.
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