Enterprise SOA

What does the introduction of ESA and its impact on life cycle management mean for IT departments?

The multilayered, multilifecycle environment created by ESA will require IT to master different skill sets and responsibilities corresponding to each layer, which will in turn likely divide IT departments into multiple teams.

One team will work to support business analysts and their modeling tools in creating and orchestrating new processes and a second team will traffic in software logistics, continually adding new services and business objects they have either created themselves or taken possession of from ISVs. A third team will tend to SAP NetWeaver, retiring and consolidating outmoded systems underneath, and a fourth will oversee all aspects of the physical infrastructure, applying adaptive computing techniques and distributing the impact of operations on the landscape. All the while, each team will be responsible for deploying, testing, monitoring, and maintaining the services and applications relevant to their layer.

Only one of these theoretical teams, the platform support team, will retain the bulk of its former skills and job descriptions. The rest of IT will assume new roles that require new skills and new training geared more heavily toward supporting the unprecedented rapidity of business process design. Most tools they will need in order to do so—and the tools that will bring business analysts directly into this equation—have yet to be designed. IT will need to master them, ...