Business IT Alignment and SOA governance

Congratulation Bryan Mjaanes on successfully implementing SOA program at Zurich Insurance .

There was one slide that I really liked that in my opinion captured the Business IT Alignment problem quite well.




The diagram explains quite beautifully how the information flow and feedback mechanism's work for SOA governance. The link from Enterprise Architecture / SOA to Business Process in my view represents the two constituents in the Enterprise that need to be aligned and in my experience this link is generally the weakest link in the picture. What I have seen in Failed SOA cases is that the shadow IT(part of Business) will end up using SOA tools and technologies (webservices etc) and solve their business problem and keep on shouting to the world that they implemented an SOA architecture. See diagram below , This generally happens when the SOA program does not have a senior management buy in and the Enterprise Architecture group is really a figure head and not very powerful.

Why is SOA more important in the Insurance space

I was at the ACORD LOMA 2007 conference and there were a lot of sessions on SOA explaining all the great things we know about SOA.

A point that I felt got missed in the conference was that "SOA is even more important in the Insurance World today as say compared to other verticals"

One of the biggest challanges facing Carriers today is "Legacy Modernization". Carriers want to achieve Straight through processing but it is probably a 100Million investment and atleast a 2-3 year plan to do that.

In the mean time you also have pressures from the market to get your website going (enable realtime functions like InsuranceID Card printing , Update Garaging Address , Add Vehicle , Add Driver etc). The question most carriers face is that - Will the investments I make for my website upgrade go waste as there is a seperate initiative for upgrading my Policy Admin system going ?

--- > Enter SOA
The Hub and Spoke Arcitecture of SOA promises to decouple your front office applications from back office systems. This becomes a very strategic advantage for present day carriers as most of them have a roadmap of upgrading there backoffice systems and also have market pressures to get new front office applications and with SOA the two initiatives do not need to be tightly coupled.

I also hear a lot about "How do I get the business to sponcer an SOA program". So here is one more reason (added to the list here) .

SOA will enable business to get what they want earlier. IF they want an upgraded website and also Straight through processing , the only way to get that is using SOA

How do you find a sponsor for an SOA program ?

SOA has an Enterprise wide impact and the question I run into from architects from various organizations I work with is ?

SOA is great and I want to get this into my organization , but the business does not care about SOA. How do I get the funding for an SOA program in my organization ?

So here is what I have been saying to my client?

Get SOA into the organization under the pretext of a a Portal Project or a BPM Project

A portal is something that the business can relate to customer experience and the BPM tools with the capability of defining business processes and visual rules engines is something they relate to their efficiency.

and a catchya situation : I have also seen Architecture groups in organizations start an SOA Framework Project that basically assembles the plumbing for future SOA projects. Most of the projects like these (with little business context) either are not completed or the results of which are never used. I call these approach as Architectural Waterfall..

Googify your Application

I am fan of Google Apps(NASDAQ:GOOG) and I think it has real potential of replacing the Corporate Intranet.

I already love gmail better than outlook (I get more spam in my corporate email than in my inbox in gmail account -And note that I give my gmail id to all commercial entities and *DO NOT* give out my corporate email id to anyone ) and Google Calendar is fast taking up my usage by having the Webservices API , Multiple Calendars etc. For my thoughts on Google Documents refer my earlier post

Besides I love the ability to configure my home page and choose between a portlet that shows freeway traffic to my home , a googifed salesforce.com that shows the sales projections from salesforce.com and a custom homegrown interface to my project management tool showing the resource utilization for my account. The ability to combine my personal and official priorities on my home page is just great.

Google Apps to me is building up to be a true Web Platform for application development. It is very ironic to me that we in IT consulting keeping on talking to Enterprises about the strategies to implement SOA and forget to mention about how to leverage existing open SOA platforms like Google Apps.

This leads me to think that the next big thing for software applications is going to be- "Googify" the Applications. As the Google platform becomes more established you will see vendors that comply to google apis and the enable there application for the google portlets.

You already see IBM Websphere support the google gadgets in their platform and several vendors like salesforce.com are already Googifying there applications.