{"id":558,"date":"2008-11-19T23:30:48","date_gmt":"2008-11-20T04:30:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.biske.com\/blog\/?p=558"},"modified":"2008-11-19T23:30:50","modified_gmt":"2008-11-20T04:30:50","slug":"centralization-and-soa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.biske.com\/blog\/?p=558","title":{"rendered":"Centralization and SOA"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post<\/a>, by Robert Swanwick, was brought to my attention by Brenda Michelson courtesy of her followup post<\/a>. In the first post, Robert describes a situation of a company that has historically operated as autonomous business units, each doing what was best for their own customers, including each building their own web channel. As they tried to incorporate more customer contributions into those web channels, he states that “they sought to build a common platform.” He didn’t provide additional details on what common means, whether it was shared customer presence across all of the web channels, or if all of the web channels were consolidated into one. He goes on:<\/p>\n

\nHowever, the autonomous business units lived on. Because they are quite independent, they are constantly seeking to diverge in order to meet the specific needs of their customers. At the same time IT continues to work towards increased centralization. As you can imagine, this is creating some tension.
\nA service oriented architecture (SOA) with shared web services and appropriate SOA governance might be their salvation. If IT can control the main architecture and help facilitate the sharing of approved web services, this firm may be able to get the centralization they need while allowing for business units to meet their own customer needs.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Personally, I think there is a risk that SOA could muddy the waters in this situation. I do agree that this is a governance problem, however, it’s not SOA governance, though, it’s IT governance. Based on the description provided, it doesn’t seem like there’s any immediate business desire to consolidate the channels to the customer or to stop viewing these units as autonomous. The second governance question is more about the goals of IT. Why is IT trying to centralize everything and strive for commonality? Are solutions not being delivered on time? Are IT costs running wild? If they are, and these costs can be tied back to the redundancies that exist across these autonomous units, then the governance board needs to determine which of these competing goals, business autonomy or IT cost reduction, is more important. If the stakeholders decide that IT cost reduction is more important, then there’s a high likelihood that SOA is going to help achieve that goal. If the stakeholders choose that business autonomy is more important, an effort to adopt an enterprise SOA is going to continue to be in conflict with that desire and may do more harm than good. Individual business units may want to run with SOA within their domains, and IT may be able to take it a bit further under the radar, but keep in mind that those efforts would not be in support of the stated business goals. In other words, even though there may be opportunities where SOA could be applied, if it puts the stated goals of the organization at risk, that’s a problem. I would encourage the leaders of this organization to first read Jeanne Ross’ excellent book, IT Governance: How Top Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior Results<\/a>\"\", to assist in getting their priorities straight. I also address how the priorities of the business must be factored into your decisions around SOA in my own book on SOA Governance<\/a>\"\".<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post, by Robert Swanwick, was brought to my attention by Brenda Michelson courtesy of her followup post. In the first post, Robert describes a situation of a company that has historically operated as autonomous business units, each doing what was best for their own customers, including each building their own web channel. As they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,8,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-governance","category-it","category-soa"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biske.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biske.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biske.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biske.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biske.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=558"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.biske.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":559,"href":"http:\/\/www.biske.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558\/revisions\/559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biske.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biske.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biske.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}