Thinkervine

Most business application consultants and experts have a high emphasis in one aspect of the solution (say finance, controlling, HR, CRM), sometimes, they even go to higher focus (marketing campaigns within the CRM) but very few of them would know what happens in the next phase of the process. They usually work in a blackbox mode knowing the input they’re getting from previous phase, how to process it before serving it to the next phase.

This has worked pretty well due to the widely spread practices in the implementation of processes within monolithic solutions. These processes were also mostly fixed as companies rarely looked forward constant process innovation to keep up with the pace of competitivity. But today, the world’s changing. Processes are being executed across the solution boundaries and even across the company’s boundaries, they may be re-engineered at several phases to match the company’s strategy on the market.

If we take the computer manufacturing industry, the usual process would be “Manufacture the equipment -> ship to dealers -> Select the equipment (customer) -> Pay (customer)“. DELL has drastically changed this process, which earned them a highly competitive advantage at several levels. The process has been changed to “Select the equipment -> Pay -> Manufacture the equipment -> Ship to customer“. At this point, DELL has improved at least on two main points: exit the dealers, reducing the number of  intermediates and they don’t need fully manufactured stocked equipment. Basically computers are stocked in warehouses in a pre-assembled state. Assembling might even be transfered (outsourced) to Supply Chain providers. At this point, they’re having a direct contact with the customer, tightening the relationship, and they’re increasing their profitability (fixed costs reduction).

For solution experts, this has a major impact on the way they usually implement the process. They need to have a complete understanding of the impacts of the re-engineering on their blueprint. How they shift from a data receiver from process step 3 to a data source for step 2.

For this purpose, the experts will require to have a broader knowledge of what they are implementing, how’s their part is being integrated within a wider scope, what happens in every phase and then they should shift into a full understanding of the process end-to-end.

So if you wonder how you can update your skills ? What you should look at ?

I say, forget modules and go end-to-end process: Order to Cash or Procure to Pay. With today’s technology and solution maturity, processes tend to have tighter integration between them. They are not just merely tables and transactions, but there’s a real logic flow orchestrating each step of the process.

Coupled with the Business Process Experts/Champions/Owners, the consultants will seek into bringing a higher value to their customer/company by optimizing the execution of the process at every step with a coherent and comprehensive understanding of the impacts of each action and decision.

In an SOA approach, the isomorphism between the process and the services will lead  to create fine grained components which are then assembled altogether into composite applications. This leads to a tighter integration of components (logical point of view) as a service might as well execute operations in a project and finance systems.

While there might still be confusion among SAP practitioners on the ability to go from a modular perspective to the end-to-end perspective, this change will be driven by the market evolution and the solution architecture anyways. The idea is that rather than being an expert on 10 FI processes while you usually implement 4 of them. The skills evolution roadmap would guide you through the different stages of your process implementation within the other modules/solutions, hence fully leveraging your training and expertise on all areas.

This full fledged knowledge of the process will also provide a new empowerment that will allow experts to drive the innovation to reflect the business requirements or even anticipate them,  as this is where the real value lies.

Anne Thomas Manes published on the Burton Groups’s blog, a SOA obituary. According to her, this is mainly due to the high promises that deceived all CTOs that believed in SOA: more agility, lower costs and shorter project periods.

She also sees the economical context of this coming year as the undertaker of SOA. As these projects are by nature transverse and will go across several business units, the funding of such projects becomes a complex issue: who’s the holder, who’s paying for what. In addition to that, in a reduced budget context, anything non-strategic goes straight to the trash can.

While at the theoretical level, I might agree with part of this vision, we still need to have a deeper look into this to match reality.

Let’s go through a set of questions and analyze it:

1. Why did so many SOA projects fail ?

At the time being, if you ask ten persons what SOA is, you will get 10 different answers. Some will wrongly say web services. Some will call it pure architecture, others will call it methods, others will see it as a combination of the two. A paradigm ?

Then if you ask them why SOA ? They will say agility, they will say reducing costs, they will say enhanced governance and they will say easier evolutivity of the systems (versus siloed and obsolete technologies).

All these answers are plain marketing. These are vendor fictional noveling to sell software and projects. The reality behind this is that most decision makers in IT have no idea on what SOA is about, what’s behind the concept and what it takes to build a real SOA project.

Most people will see in SOA a magic wand that will transform their landscape through some kind of sparkling big bang. All older spaghetti cobol systems magically transforming into futuristic orchestrated services based applications.

The fundamental error is there. They define SOA as a goal instead of a mean.

SOA in itself has no purpose and if your system is working fine, keep it there. SOA must be a base for building new applications that will need to interact with existing systems and need to be able to communicate with future (internal and external) bricks of the landscape . Many technologies are associated to SOA, we may cite Software as a Service (SaaS), Business Process Management (BPM), mash-ups and web applications.

SOA must be derived from a business requirement and should not be technologically driven. It must support the implementation of a business process, that goes through different systems, that needs to be monitored through its different milestones and that might need to take in account fast changes (to keep up competitivity).

Transforming the current landscape into services orientation to reduce maintenance costs is a typical error.  This comes from a common confusion between SOA and web services. While you might want to expose an existing functionality as a service to be consumed by a third party application, you may just build a frontal web service that will be invoked. Rather than doing this, many companies will dive into a complex project implementation [reworking] leading to Neverland.

2- How to make SOA projects successful ?

In order to make SOA projects successful, you will need to assess several mitigation points:

a. Do not expect magic: SOA is costy and do not expect a 80% ROI. SOA projects must be appropriately funded by the each involved Line of Businesse at the appropriate balance.

b. SOA must be driven through business needs. A strict governance should be setup with process owners (functional and technical) that will understand all the underlying requirements of its implementation. These two will then monitor the build and runtime. They should be the single point of contact regarding any subjected related to the process.

c. SOA projects are transverse projects. For this purpose they need a common sponsor at the highest level federating all the LOBs effected by the process dealt with.

d. SOAs are based on the principle of reuse of existing business services (a set of lower level [web] services with a business meaning). For this purpose an in-depth analyze should be carried over all the processes that might potentially be effected by the implementation of the new architecture.

e. The transformation should be carried with the support of an architecture framework (e.g. TOGAF, EAF, Gartner’s).

f. Before the implementation project starts, KPIs must be defined. For this purpose, we need to have a common understanding of what the KPIs are, what will be measured, how, what are the business rules and which thresholds should start a preventive action.

g. SOA requires proactivity all along the implementation. It should reflect the process execution in the real world. Interviews with the key-users should be carried in order to have an end-to-end understanding of the processes.

h. Assess the SOA maturity. Before implemeting a Service Oriented Architecture, the organization must ensure that they have the required level of maturity at both the business and technical level allowing them to reach their targets.

3- Are Service Oriented Architectures really dead ?

Service oriented architecture is just a marketing name to define the principle of resources available as a service. These services represent a business object (e.g. credit check) and are orchestrated in order to create a business process.

While this might look new and innovative, this has long been implemented in several industries, only under different names. The main change today resides into the maturity of the underlying technologies and their standardization. As part of the natural life cycle of an IT landscape, systems will adopt new architectural paradigms, including the service approach. Several technologies are there to stay or evolve. They are coercedly linked to the service oriented architecture.

SOA is there to stay. The only thing that might change is really just the name.

Note: This post was also posted on the SAP Developer Network

Un petit peu d’humour (pour les plus avertis seulement)… Voici un  extrait de vie des architectes

La SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) représente depuis quelques années l’un des principaux maux de tête des DSI, des architectes, des éditeurs et des sociétés de conseil. Gartner prévoit que 80% des  projets informatiques seront basés sur la SOA en 2008. Aujourd’hui, 40% des entreprises démarrent des projets dans ce même sens. Cependant, on trouve difficilement une définition communément admise de la SOA.
Je me propose d’être votre guide afin de mieux appréhender cette notion plus ou moins obscure. Nous vulgariserons l’ensemble des concepts au delà des aspects techniques (qui ne seront pas traités dans cet article).