IT-business alignment, and the four levels of SOA capability
Having done quite a lot of research and analysis around how SOA can improve IT-business alignment if "done right", it's become apparent to me that organisations think and talk about the ability of SOA to improve IT-business alignment from four perspectives. The perspective they use, depends on the amount of time they’ve had to work with the concepts and the technologies involved. This appears to be true for both suppliers and users of IT!
The capabilities they refer to form a kind of “stepladder”, with each capability providing a foundation for the next.
(
By the way, I know that ZapThink also talks about four benefits in the context of SOA: reduce integration expense, increase asset reuse, increase business agility, reduce business risk – but I think these are different. ZapThink’s perspective is about what SOA can do: this thought is about how SOA can do it.)
The four capabilities are – from the “bottom up”:
Improved flexibility. This is one of the most-talked about potential capabilities of SOA, and it is the first one that most people consider. Flexibility of course concerns the ability of solutions to be altered in the face of changing business and technology requirements, and is boosted by the loosely-coupled nature of the services which are composed to meet solution requirements in a SOA environment.
Large-scale reuse. Along with flexibility, reuse is the other commonly talked-about SOA potential capability. With effective service-based solution design efforts in place, IT delivery organisations have the potential to build up libraries of business-meaningful functionality. These libraries will not be tied to particular usage scenarios, and (crucially, unlike earlier attempts at object-based reuse) are easily composable and re-composable to meet new business requirements; and can be hosted remotely or locally. With these libraries, organisations can reduce the investment required to address new business software requirements; make delivery of new solutions quicker and more reliable; and also improve the accuracy and speed with which solutions can be changed.
Improved comprehensibility. Successful SOA initiatives create groups of services which can be clearly linked to individual tasks within business processes, as well as lower-level technical services. In other words, strong service portfolios have many key elements which are easily comprehensible to business audiences (examples might include services which manage customer information, or which validate orders). Software comprehensibility is not often talked about as a benefit of SOA, but it has a massive impact on the ability of a SOA initiative to improve IT-business alignment. When software functionality is easily comprehensible, it is much easier to build a
common language between business and IT – which makes it easier to engage business stakeholders in real investment discussions and solution design work; and to show how particular “pieces” of software contribute to business activity
Improved value visibility. Beyond providing more comprehensible software solutions, successful SOA initiatives also have the potential to increase the visibility of IT’s value to the business. At the heart of this possibility is the fact that the idea of a “service” is both a business-meaningful unit of software design when a solution is being conceived and built; and a business-meaningful unit of reporting when a solution design is in production. With SOA, organisations have the ability to clearly relate the production of solutions in an IT environment, to the operation of solutions in a business environment. Together with the promise of comprehensibility, the visibility that an SOA initiative brings enables business stakeholders, administrators, designers and developers to share a common view of solutions
which makes sense to all of them. This has implications for improving the “business-alignment” of IT investment and IT service delivery, and for the co-operative management of change.
Moving from one step to the next requires a change in thinking as well as the utilisation of different technologies. As you move towards thinking about "value visibility", your thinking and approach to SOA has to change from one predominantly focused on software development concerns (which is where most people are today) to one focused on the entire delivery lifecycle.
If anyone’s got any comments or thoughts on this, I’d love to hear them – plaudits and brickbats are both welcome.
