SOA - Loosing sight of agility

Its getting harder and harder to remember that the idea behind the SOA technology is agility - agility in the sense that the business can get the business processes it wants when it wants them. That timescale is increasingly measured in hours or days, not months or years.

The aspect of systems that is driven by change is the knowledge encapsulated within them. When you create a service to, say, configure a service or product within an order entry system, the service or product is changing to meet market demand. Insurance policy constraints change regularly due to legislation as well as market forces - in short, agility can only be achieved if it is possible to adapt and maintain elemental or replace composite services easily - within hours.

Its the technology used to create the services that will ultimately determine the level of agility achieved, and therefore the ROI gained. Coding services the old fashioned way - functional specification, program spec, programming in a language etc - is, therefore, not a realistic option. At the end of many man years effort, all a company will have is another legacy system, albeit made up of composite services carefully orchestrated.

Look for a technology that enables users to create composite services without any coding - that's where agility lies.

SOA - loosing sight of the objective

I visited an insurance company today to talk about their investment in creating an SOA. They had appointed a manager to lead the project and had forty five programmers working. They have been working for over a year. So far, there has been no tangible result. Yes, they are creating services but they need a lot before they can create a worthwhile business process.

Forty five Programmers for a year? They have obviously lost sight of the principal justification for such an investment - Agility! How can a technology that's touted as the answer to everyone's need for agility need more than forty five man years of effort just to get started.

Then there's another problem - Once the new services are created, say with an average of two man years of programming a piece in them, how easy is it to modify them? They desperately need a technology that can create services in a hundredth of the time. A technology that does away with the need for specification and programming. One that allows its users to create services based applications iteratively through dialogue with the users. They do exist.

Until you've got that, you have not got anything.

What is Agile IT?

Agile IT systems are based on new technologies that allow existing business processes to be modified and new business processes to be developed at the same pace as the user can articulate them. To achieve this, the traditional development process of Analysis, specification, programming, testing and release has to be ditched and replaced with a single step, iterative process.Because the processes most likely to be developed this way are the key, customer facing knowledge based business processes such as quotation, configuration, order processing, pricing and margin management, the key enabling technology at the core of such systems is business rules server capable of capturing knowledge coupled to an advanced graphical forms designer. Using this technology, business processes can be expressed entirely in terms of inputs, rules and outputs.Unfortunately, having this technology alone is not enough. To be really effective, Agile IT solutions have to be an integral part of the overall existing IT infrastructure. Ideally, this should be accomplished by first exposing the services available in the participating legacy systems and then calling these services as and when required within the new and improved business processes as they are developed. This type of architecture is termed an SOA (Service Orientated Architecture) and the resulting integration is termed Loose. It is not essential that this type of integration technology should be used, and agile IT solutions can and are being developed without it by relying on more traditional, hard, integration techniques.When selecting an Agile IT toolset, it is important that it should be able to participate in an SOA environment, even if its first uses are based on more traditional technologies.