In an ideal world, companies would run their businesses as if their application portfolio were a single application. This application would take orders, generate shipping notices, and manage accounts receivable. It would also run manufacturing processes, automatically replenish materials as necessary, and exist as a Web-based front-end for customer interaction. Instead, the real world is populated with silos of data that don’t interact, and gaggles of independent applications that defy efforts to unify processes across the enterprise. Composite Applications are new applications created by seamlessly connecting existing services together without changing the underlying applications, with the purpose of driving business process and connectivity. Examples of such applications include source-to-settle, order-to-cash, and request-to-resolve.
This preceding vision is about a transformation of an IT application infrastructure from stove-piped applications to composite applications to a business service repository. So how far along are companies toward this vision: An agile infrastructure to support an agile business? I recently completed a 10-city US tour and met over 200 IT and business professionals — and I asked them that question. The answer was…“not very far along”. The reasons for it vary but the most important reason is that senior management at companies is not appreciating the value of being service-driven.
When implemented strategically, a service-oriented architecture enables the evolution to a well connected “service-driven enterprise” where information and application silos can be bridged to deliver better visibility of fast-changing business events and critical information. A service-driven enterprise embraces the concept of increasing business velocity and achieves the following strategic goals:
- A more succinct expression of purpose and strategic direction
- A shared understanding at the top team level of what needs to be improved by how much by when
- An integrated view of cross-group linkages and interdependencies
- A greater focus on the timeliness and quality of key customer-touching business process outputs to balance the traditional financial metrics
- Tighter alignment of strategy, structure, business process and technology
- Arguably, the best return on your IT investment and top team agreement on where are best applied, at what cost and for what results
It is this strategic vision that is lacking at most companies. It is not about lack of investment money, it is not about higher investment priorities, it is about lack of vision. There may be other strategic visions at those companies but not this one.The first major technology step toward this business vision is support for a Composite Application Framework (CAF). A CAF is a blend of infrastructure products and technology expertise, with a command of the customer relationship management, supply chain management, and enterprise resource planning domains, and includes the following elements:
- a library of comprehensive, customer-driven business service and process templates that can be easily tailored,
- common business objects for each vertical application,
- standards-based data transformations,
- an easy-to-use graphical modeling tool for rapid development of new composite applications, and
- broad support for connectivity and integration with existing application environments.
Providing a rapid change capability enables companies to react to new requirements and opportunities and lowers the total cost of maintenance over the life of the composite application. The consistent framework also enables each composite application to be extended to define more end-to-end processes, creating a more agile company.
The concept of composite applications also represents a significant step toward delivering “just in time” services in a service-oriented-architecture – where developers and business analysts can deliver applications from a service layer that maps to distinct business domains. Service-oriented architectures are well documented to reduce the cost, complexity, and time to deploy flexible business applications. Composite applications are an important approach that will help deliver on the original promise of Web services, SOA and BPM. By developing the proper building blocks based on customer requirements and field-driven best practices, the business process library can become a rich repository of long-lasting IT that will outlive any particular composite application of which it becomes a part.
An important business step toward this business vision concerns the establishment of governance – at the levels of corporate, IT and SOA. Two aspects of Corporate Governance are 1) establishing processes that define who is empowered to make certain decisions, and 2) establishing mechanisms and policies to measure and control the way decisions are implemented. IT Governance is a subset of Corporate Governance that defines the decision-making rights associated with IT investments and includes the mechanisms and policies used to measure and control the way IT decisions are prioritized and executed. Lastly, SOA Governance is an extension of IT Governance that defines the decision-making rights associated with the definition and deployment of business services and composite applications and includes the mechanisms and policies used to measure and control the way services are defined, deployed, maintained and monitored.
SOA introduces many independent and self-contained moving parts – components which are reused widely across the enterprise and are a vital part of mission-critical business processes. The goal of SOA Governance is to manage the quality, consistency, predictability, change and interdependencies of services. SOA Governance strives to blend the flexibility of service orientation with the control of traditional IT architectures. An SOA Governance Framework enables an organization to answer the following questions:
- What happens when a service is changed?
- How can you be sure the service you are consuming is of high quality?
- How can you be sure a new service is compliant with IT, business and regulatory policies?
- How can you ensure predictable uptime of a service?
Three leading indicators of the strategic importance of SOA at your company are 1) senior management’s commitment to being service-driven, 2) a technology commitment to a transitional composite application framework, and 3) a business commitment to governance.
