Key Learnings: SOA Key Success Factors (BEA-IT 2002-2006)

Based on my conversation with my peers in the industry, there is still a lot of keen desire by IT Leadership teams to understand the key success factors for adopting SOA. Following are the list of key success factors we (IT leadership team) had identified while I was the CTO-IT at BEA Systems.

1. Build the right team
2. Organize for success
3. Build coalition with business partners
4. Maintain Flexibility

The slides of these are available here. I have created a link of all my key learning blogs at my structured blog.

SOA Practitioners Guide Part 4: SOA and ITIL Convergence

The SOA Practitioners have been working on the next set of the Practitioners' Guide with SOA and ITIL Convergence being the first (Part 4) of new set of Guides. Burc Oral has been leading this effort for the Practitioners' and is presentation (SOA Practitioners Guide Part 4: SOA and ITIL Convergence) this at the eGov meeting today (October 1st, 2007).

Integration Tomorrow, Part 2: SOA Architecture

Part 1 of the two-part series described the past and current integration approaches. This second part, takes a practical approach on how technology is going to change business landscape and the potential infrastructure changes required to integrate the business both at business and IT levels.

Read more about this here.

Vendors need to incorporate SOA infrastructure in legay applications

The majority of the IT budget (over 80%) is typically committed to supporting the existing infrastructure and applications. Read how vendors can help acclerate the SOA adoption here.

Defining Business Agility

There has and continues to be a lot of discussion around Business Agility and read my definition here.

SOA Postulates, Theorems & Corollaries

Similar to the mathematics, I felt that there is a need to define the laws for Service Oriented Architecture based on facts, observations and technology roadmaps and have termed tham as SOA Postulates, SOA Theorems and SOA Corollaries.
Read more about it here.

Key Learnings: Overcoming IT obstacle

I used to get offended whenever anyone stated that IT was an obstacle for Business, most probably because of I have been part of IT twice in my career. After giving this some thought following are some of the approaches IT could take to overcome this perception.

Read more about this here.

Key Learnings: IT Driven Runaway Projects

A scenario where Business has approved a large IT project with the timeline keep moving out with no end in sight.

Read more about how to identify and fix such projects here.

Key Learning: Business Drivern Runaway Projects

An example on how to manage a scenario where cash rich LOB continues to invest and drive projects with no foreseable return on investment.

Read more about it here.

Technology Manager Blues

Challenges of being in IT management in a rapidly changing world of technology.

Being in a technology management role is becoming increasingly difficult. We have to constantly balance conflicting factors. Here is a partial list.

- The pace of technological evolution continues to accelerate. Before we have a chance to adopt the most recent wave of promising evolution, the world is moving onto next. SOA, CEP, Web 2.0

- Business community demands faster response. While they consider IT indispensable, IT is also viewed as a roadblock to achieving business objectives.

- Current corporate environment is always shifting. Companies are buying other companies or getting bought out. This leads to a very short term focus and makes it difficult to make fundamental changes necessary for long term health of the organization.

- There are Legacy systems and Legacy people afraid to adopt to changes

- Sorting through vendor hypes and reality requires being on-guard all the time. The danger of over reliance on the latest technological silver bullet can lead to a lot of wasted time(POC etc.), while ignoring latest technological advances could potentially lead to a situation where the entire business model could be at risk (e.g. travel agencies)

- Only a minority of IT people "get it", when it comes to things that yield long term benefits such as Enterprise Architecture, SOA etc. Most are more comfortable dealing with day to day requirements and are not interested in long term.

I am sure there a number of other factors. I will talk about these topics in future postings.