New SOA strategy planning tool - live from today
Today we're delighted to announce that our SOA strategy planning tool, hosted at
www.itstrategyplans.com/soa, is now live. This is a new thing for us and if you're interested in SOA, we think you'll find it useful.
What we've launched is a comprehensive, interactive, and vendor-independent online tool that goes much further than IT vendors' own online SOA assessment tools - and crucially, there's nothing behind it that is going to steer you towards buying tools or technologies from a particular company.
You can use the tool, free of charge, to determine your levels of competence in six areas that are crucial to SOA success: concepts, strategy, architecture, organisation and people, governance, and technology and infrastructure. On top of that, you can quickly see how your levels of competence compare to average industry benchmark scores.
As I said above, access to these features costs nothing.
If you want to know how your competence levels affect your SOA strategy and how you can reduce the costs and risks associated with SOA, then for a modest fee (normally £200 - but if you purchase before the end of September 2007, it's £130) you can gain access to premium features. With premium access you can generate personalised action planning reports that clearly lay out actions you need to take in order to improve your competency levels - as well as providing more detailed breakdowns of how you compare to the benchmark averages (across your industry, geography and company size).
You can use premium access to generate as many reports as you like, whenever you like. So as your SOA programme progresses and you gain more experience and capability, you can revisit the tool and gain new insights.
It's been a long, long road, and we (and our partner
JEMM Research) have put in months of effort to get here since we started work on this project back in November 2006. This has been a major investment for us - so why have we done it?
There are two reasons. Firstly, of course, we'll be delighted when people decide they want to buy premium access to the tool. That's easy. Just as importantly, though, we wanted to try and find new ways of learning about how companies are pursuing key IT initiatives. By building tools like this one and inviting people to use them to learn about their competence levels and how they can improve, we're also able to look at aggregated usage data from the tool to see how industries are grappling with SOA, and how the situation is changing over time.
For a group of companies that talks so much about technology innovation, we've found that the IT industry analyst community is generally pretty slow at trying to use technology in new ways. As a small company we can perhaps make bolder moves more quickly - and that's what we're trying to do here. If we see success with this tool, we'll be launching more over time, focusing on different types of IT initiative.
So - please
check out the tool, give us your feedback, and let us know if there are other areas you think we should apply this approach to!
Labels: MWD, SOA, strategy planning
