Delivering greater agility

Marc Wilkinson is HP’s Software Group Chief Technologist, focusing on the network and service provider market worldwide. Most recently, Marc was deputy CTO at RiverSoft and Micromuse. He joined HP in 2004 to implement HP’s vision of an organisation in which business and IT are synchronized to capitalize on change within key corporate accounts. Marc is also chartered to bring the industry direction and customer requirements back into HP engineering plans and roadmaps.

CXO. How can CIOs/CTOs effectively communicate the benefits of SOA to other board members? What business/operational challenges does SOA address, and what are its main benefits?

MW. I think this has been made somewhat easier by the fact that the term SOA has received a lot of coverage in the press, and is currently at the forefront of people’s minds. To be honest, I think the most effective way for a CIO or CTO to explain the business benefits of SOA to the board or other decision-makers (CEO, CFO, etc.) is to talk about it in business terms rather than describe its technological advantages. When one adopts a service-oriented architecture, the very name suggests moving the IT function towards being more focused on improving the quality of service to end-users – which ultimately brings greater alignment between IT and the business, something that is currently top of the corporate agenda.

If you look back over the last 10 years, IT has been very good at spending money – with sometimes-dubious returns on investment. The key for the modern CIO is to start illustrating how, by making IT service-oriented, he or she is bringing IT round to align with business strategy so that when the business needs to react – whether it’s for regulatory, competitive or other reasons – IT is able to react with it. In the past, the relationship has often been a bit like taking a car to the garage, with IT as the mechanic whistling through his teeth and telling the customer “it’s going to cost you, and it’s going to take a while”. In order for companies to compete effectively in the modern business environment, this situation needs to change.

CXO. So this is really part of a wider issue regarding communication between those in IT and those charged with realising ROI, formulating strategy, driving the business forward, etc?

MW. Yes, I think it is. There are parts of SOA that are technology-driven, but there are also many parts of it that are people, process and governance-driven, so bringing in the right kind of governance process represents an opportunity for IT to demonstrate visibility and transparency to the business. Aligning IT with the business strategy not only allows for rapid change and more efficient delivery of services, but also means it is able to demonstrate the value and cost of transactions, the rate of change, and so on.

Part of the message that we would pass on to the board (or the CFO if that is where the money is coming from) is that the technology aspects of SOA enable reduction of duplication, facilitate rapid change and bring service enhancements, and also bring better visibility into alignment, costs and utilisation of resources. Ultimately, by using the various component parts of SOA, IT is actually able to re-use the existing infrastructure and software assets – so SOA does not necessarily require millions of dollars in investment. Re-use means that hardware utilisation rates will go up and the quality of software components will improve through better testing and consolidation.

CXO. And are there any hidden advantages to implementing SOA that aren’t immediately obvious?

MW. There are a number of IT benefits that the board is probably less concerned with – including, for example, platform agnostics. The whole point about SOA is that it’s a generic architecture built around a distributed, componentised system. The well-defined interface between one service component and another allows us to extract the function and simplify how services are built and delivered. However, most C-level, senior management figures are likely to be more interested in the greater business agility that this modular, componentised type of IT can provide.

Once you start thinking about what business agility actually means, this then becomes a little more obvious. For instance, take a mobile phone provider like Vodafone. They want to provide their VodafoneLive service all over Europe, which is a business requirement that IT needs to be able to facilitate – regardless of country and regardless of the technology needed to deliver it. The business has put a strategy in place and IT needs to be able to deliver on it. This is where a service-oriented approach to IT can help.

CXO. There is still a lot of hype and confusion about SOA implementation, execution and management. So where should senior management start when approaching a possible SOA rollout? Is there an ‘SOA checklist’ companies should employ?

MW. One of the key words here is ‘confusion’ – while there is a lot of talk about SOA, many people are confused about what it is. Many think SOA equals web services, whereas in actual fact web services is really just an implementation approach; it is possible to adopt a service-oriented architecture using any language or system.

There is no ‘SOA-101’ or ‘five-steps to SOA nirvana’, since agility can really only be achieved with alignment of the business and IT strategies and drivers. SOA is more than just a technical architecture, it spans the business and technology worlds – across people, process and technology.

My advice would be to start with key or well-defined business process, understand the (sub) services it is composed of, how they interact and depend on each other, what functions and capabilities are needed, and address each of these.

HP Consulting and Integration offers SOA services to help companies make this transition: envisioning, assessment, governance and architecture, enablement, service development, web services development and SOA management.

CXO. In most cases, effective management of SOA is key to reaping the architecture’s full benefits. What challenges does SOA management present? Is management difficult?

MW. SOA promotes design and development of sub-services, components that can be used and re-used as part of many business services. These component services will often be designed and developed independently and need to be pulled together as part of a bigger plan or architect. Without this bigger picture, IT will again miss the point of supporting the business goals and strategy.

Strong governance is required if the SOA is to deliver on its potential. Without it, business service quality, reliability, performance and agility will all be affected. The systems will be developed in a much more ad hoc manner, impacting agility, and of course now that we are re-using components in many business services the impact across the business will be greater.

Even change control and component lifecycle are critical, since changing a component now could affect many services, fault-finding and bug-fixing made harder by the nature of composed system.

CXO. How should companies best approach the management of SOA?

MW. We have discussed the need for governance and architectural alignment. Management of an SOA starts with good old-fashioned (but ever necessary) resource and service management. Ultimately, the component services are delivered on IT resources and can be managed independently – and this is, of course, the core area of HP OpenView’s heritage, with much of the portfolio covering resource management and optimisation. Managing the components is all well and good, but with closer business/IT alignment and a greater focus on delivering the business strategy, understanding how these components are used and what services are impacted is key. HP OpenView has been extending the portfolio into business alignment for a while now, covering service and resource information, KPIs and status in real-time and in business terms.

Other aspects important to managing SOA are policy management and security – including both access and information security. You don’t want just anybody changing business and service policies on the fly; processes, controls and audit capabilities around these functions are necessary to keep an SOA operating optimally.

CXO. Mention has been made of the need for the creation of a new role – that of ‘chief architect’. What would be the function of such a role, and how would this differ from the traditional CIO or CTO role? Do you think this is a necessary step?

MW. I do see that the chief architect is an evolution of where we are today, sitting in-between the more business-focused CIO and the technology-driven CTO, as part of the alignment between business strategy and IT.

With an SOA, much more of the business logic is outside code, and the key architects no longer need to be code-hacks – or rather, they need to be code-savvy and business and service-savvy. There is a need to design, maintain and govern the architecture of the service environment. The chief architect will be able to address some of the challenges faced in the introduction of an SOA.

CXO. You were brought in to implement HP’s vision of an organisation in which “business and IT are synchronised to capitalise on change within key corporate accounts”. How is SOA helping you to realise this vision?

MW. HP’s vision of an adaptive enterprise, where the business can change easily, cheaply and as frequently as they need to compete successfully requires IT to be aligned with the business goals – something we have mentioned more than once here. In explaining our strategy to organisations and bringing alive the transformation, at some point it always comes down to how this will be achieved.

We have four architectural drivers behind this vision: simplification, standardisation, modularity and integration. SOA’s abstraction supports simplification (along with the general virtualisation of the infrastructure – SAN, VLANS, clusters and virtual machines, etc.) – and addresses standardisation in multiple ways: in adherence to recognised standards such as web services, but also because it promotes re-use so an organisation will build standard components that are re-used throughout delivery of their services. This, of course, supports the driver for modularity. Standard, well-defined, distributed interfaces (to services) support integration and alignment with business goals. So in a nutshell, SOA supports the goal of an adaptive enterprise.