Enterprise SOA

How will IT change in an ESA world?

As noted earlier, and as illustrated by the SupplyOn example, IT will have its hands full in the early stages, building a fully functional backplane, populating the Enterprise Services Repository, and composing the first few generations of services before modeling tools become sophisticated and pervasive enough to disperse development beyond IT and across the enterprise. (We'll discuss that last point shortly.) But once ESA matures, what will IT's role be?

Recalling the core/context model from Chapter 2, IT's twin responsibilities in an ESA world are to consolidate nondifferentiating "context" systems and to use the savings to reinvest in new, differentiating, and potentially disruptive "core" capabilities that drive process innovation. In an ESA world, debates such as the eternal build versus buy cease to matter. IT is always building core and buying context, and it is implementing both within an architecture that essentially doesn't distinguish between the two.

In this environment, specialization and organization around applications or development languages are obsolete. A new IT department may look more like the vision shown in Figure 3-9 and outlined in the following list:

• The repository keepers oversee the care and feeding of the architecture and the Enterprise Services Repository. They define standards and guidelines, manage the service definition process, implement the backplane, keep the service repository clean and coherent, and above all, ...