Service-oriented architecture (SOA) can only be rolled out when business and IT come together.
This was the key message of the ITWeb SOA conference held at the Campus in Bryanston. The event saw Alok Goswami, Nedbank process portfolio manager for Group Technology Business Improvement, and Francina Botha, Nedbank senior manager for SOA Centre of Excellence, examine the role of change management when implementing SOA.
Nedbank is currently in the building phase of its SOA implementation strategy, supported by IBM.
According to Goswami, SOA services are not confined within IT and rather span across the entire enterprise.
“Business needs to work with IT to ensure that applications are developed to maximum flexibility, agility, and reusability for current, as well as future needs. If we don't have collaboration between business and IT, then the SOA strategy is bound to fail,” Goswami said.
He added: “There should be an ability to respond and adapt to the emerging markets, technologies and competitors. The IT infrastructure must be capable of supporting new business processes as well as future changes.
“When you go on your SOA journey, you are only SOA ready when the organisation has a generic approach to accommodate many future possibilities and uncertainties, yet specific enough to provide a framework for short-term decision-making.”
Culture change
In addition, Goswami urged companies to have an asset-based view of IT investments and governance structure to encourage business and IT alignment. He said companies need to have the right mindset to introduce key roles that need to be assigned with the SOA implementation strategy.
Botha indicated that the one role that can make or break the SOA implementation strategy is the service architect, who needs to work with the service designer, who in turn, is accountable to making contracts for the service provider and service consumer. Process engineers also play a vital role in the success of the implementation.
Botha said integration between people, business processes and technology is imperative to remove silos within the organisation.
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