Two major threats hang over the head of today’s CIO:
that the company will outsource IT’s functions, and that the users
throughout the enterprise will indulge in amateur self-help through
consumption of Web services that bypass IT’s governance, security
measures, and future planning.
And in the realm of planning, two major issues prey on the CIO’s
mind: how to integrate more and more of the legacy computing systems,
and concurrently how to develop a more agile environment for the future
with reusable and composable services, in an architecture changing
increasingly to accord with the principles of SOA.
Meanwhile
in the world of IT’s customers – the users – the triumphs of Web 2.0
continue to sharpen their appetites for more services, on demand and
custom-mashed, to deliver the vital knowledge that increases profit.
They see the ease with which the Web provides services, and expect the
same in the enterprise.
While Web 2.0 and SOA
are clearly related in certain ways, there are also profound
differences between them. And while the users are crucially important
to driving the evolution of the Web applications, the forces that
change the underlying architecture of the enterprise are institutional.
These
are the challenges that face IT today. The task is essentially to grasp
all the threads of opportunity presented by recent technological
development and bring them all together harmoniously.
“Combining Enterprise Web 2.0’s ability to deliver business-critical applications over the Web and SOA’s
ability to deliver services provides a solution that can deliver the
ubiquitous consumption of service to anyone, anywhere in any
environment. What to do with this ability will be the next challenge
for IT and end users. IT will look for ways to create service-based
components that can be reused across the enterprise. Instead of having
just a sortable table they can reuse in applications, IT will look to
create a service-enabled table they can drop into any application. The
table will then be able to communicate with other service-enabled
components to exchange data and events.” – Enterprise Web 2.0 Solves the Last Mile
If architecture change comes to the
enterprise in a holistic manner, it will have to be IT that brings this
about, or else IT will have been replaced by on-demand solutions from
the Web. But SOA is a hard sell to make to the company.
“Maybe it’s because vendors still sell SOA
as toolsets, versus concepts. (Who can sell a “concept,” right?) Or,
maybe business users are perplexed by the technospeak that typically is
invoked in SOA discussions. For a variety of reasons, SOA adoption has been moving at a snail’s pace within enterprises, according to the latest report out of Saugatuck Research.” – Saugatuck: why SOA adoption is at a ‘crawl’
SOA adoption is not a bolt-on technology, but an entire change in culture enterprise-wide.
“And a key part – perhaps the most important part – of a healthy SOA lifestyle is an organization built on trust” – Ready for SOA? Here’s a litmus test
At a minimum CIOs have to get better at explaining their technical requirements, but the future role of the CIO
is probably far more visionary than even this. IT needs to present the
business case for each of its developments, which means that IT needs
first to understand what the users want.
“The bottom line, as Jack points out, is that
businesspeople don’t want or care about service-oriented architecture.
They want answers and fixes to their problems. They want relief to
their pain. They want financial success with their projects.” – Ponder this: how many businesspeople are begging for SOA?
For the CIO to act
as a principal evangelist for the organization’s future, a lot of
supporting case data will be needed. IT needs get into its customers’
heads, and walk in their shoes. IT needs to make the case for what the
users want better than the users can.
As we’ve suggested before, IT has to learn some marketing skills.
This becomes more apparent as we consider that IT needs to make some
serious efforts in market research, and poll its customers throughout
the organization.
IT remains the best equipped and most
suitable force within the enterprise to develop the agility needed for
survival and prosperity. But in today’s world, where the opportunities
are technological, IT has to enlarge its interests beyond technology,
and into the nature of enterprise opportunity.
