Getting the right focus for IT governance
I've long been a fan of Nick Malik's
blog - and indeed it was his blog that led me to ask him if he'd be happy to be interviewed for
our book on IT-business alignment.
In this post Nick nails quite a few aspects of IT governance, and explains how they fit in the context of embarking on an SOA initiative.
Nick correctly calls out the dual roles of governance: not only in directing work so that things are "done right"; but also in directing work so that we "do the right things". The former area is the one where IT departments are most comfortable: you can focus on getting things right while retaining a very internal IT perspective. Doing the latter and focusing on doing the right things requires another set of skills and commitments that are less familiar to most.
It's easy to look at governance as Nick outlines it (and as many others do too, including us in our book) and say "hmm, this looks like a pretty heavyweight overhead to me. If I'm going to have to make significant extra investment in this governance stuff, how can I make the case for it?"
The key point here is that one of the things that makes IT governance "good" is fitness for purpose. Governance doesn't have to entail masses of documentation, full-time headcount, onerous processes and big technology investments. As Nick implies, a key feature of governance work is agreeing a strategic destination and a set of navigation charts.
In this context, your focus shouldn't be securing headcount and defining processes: it should be on securing agreements and commitments from people to work together.
Labels: book, governance
Zachman Framework != Enterprise Architecture
Just thought it would be worth linking to
this post I just made over at the
Technology Garden blog, the companion site for our
new book on IT-business alignment. See you over there!
Labels: book, EA
CIO podcast
Over here is the first of what we hope will be a series of podcasts with CIOs who've instigated work to improve IT-business alignment in their organisations. The interview is with New Zealand-resident Peter Burggraaff, until recently the CIO of NZ retail chain
Farmers Trading Company. It follows on from the work we did last year on our
forthcoming book, which is due out in a couple of weeks.
Peter talks to us in this 31'34" podcast episode about his initiative at Farmers and the outcomes he achieved.
In the podcast Peter explains that Farmers was in a situation where IT cost was way too high, and although the IT organisation was doing some things well (particularly managing operational services) it wasn't seen as a real contributor of business value as Farmers looked to put some big business changes in place. He goes on to explain how he started to turn this situation around and built a solid and trusted relationship with Farmers business management.
We're very excited to present this podcast, and we very much hope to be doing more of these over the coming weeks and months. Thanks Peter!
If you'd like to get involved in this programme of podcasts don't hesitate to
let us know.
Labels: book, CIO, podcast
Sustainable SOA and "closed loop" thinking
Todd Biske of Momentum has a
great blog on SOA and EA, and
one of his recent posts chimed particularly with something we've been talking about for quite a while now - sustainability. This is a theme that NeilM and I and Jon (and also Dale, our partner at
Freeform Dynamics and book co-author) - have been developing throughout 2006 for our
book on IT-business alignment.
The idea of sustainability isn't really rocket science but it's a vital touchpoint in the process of strategic IT thinking. What it means is that it's not enough to think about technology in the context of solving a problem or addressing a need that you have today. To deliver sustainable value from IT you have to think about how technology will continue to address your needs going forward. Arguably this was a key challenge that contributed to so much disillusionment surrounding the
Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) boom in the late 1990s and early 00s: EAI technology was great at fixing tactical and existing problems (how can we synchronise key customer data across these x systems? etc) but because of its sometimes esoteric (and certainly non developer friendly) nature a lot of the technology couldn't really support a strategic shift around how *new* capabilities should be developed to make integratability a "baked in" feature. A better balanced forward-looking approach to integratability (not just integration)is of course one of the things that makes SOA so interesting.
Todd's post is talking about how IT so often looks at things from the point of view of a set of discrete and disconnected events - and one particular piece grabbed my attention in the context of SOA:
"IT produces solutions, and then forgets about them unless a user complains or some alarm goes off. If an organization takes on SOA, but still operates with this mentality, the only thing that has changed is that they are producing services instead of applications."
It's more fundamental than that though.
A focus on service delivery (which for us is what SOA is really about) is a focus that is predicated on closed-loop thinking. A service is something that is experienced over a period of time by a consumer, not just a capability that you've built. I'd say, then, that if you work with the mentality Todd talks about then you're not even producing services - you're producing itty-bitty applications. The concept of "service" - a consistent experience provided to a consumer - is what underpins that evolved, closed-loop view. Without it you're not doing SOA.
This means that SOA is only possible when you consider the whole lifecycle of services over time as they are created, changed and (yes) retired. And that's where sustainability comes in. If you're not thinking ahead to how you will deliver that consistent experience you're not thinking in a sustainable way. You're thinking about point projects, point applications, point functions, and that's how we got into the mess we're in.
Importantly this shift in mindset to think about how to deliver sustainable business value from IT takes us well beyond the world of technology product procurement. It's all about process, practice, organisation and culture and nothing to do with whether you bought the blue or the red ESB.
Without this understanding at the top of your mind as you embark on SOA or indeed any other IT initiative (unless it's responding to a *very* opportunistic and short-lived requirement) entropy will always win. If you're always looking backwards then the reality of business requirements and the reality of IT capability will quickly diverge in unwelcome ways.
Labels: book, SOA, sustainability
