How Bell Canada Broke Out of Its Silos

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December 21, 2006

How Bell Canada Broke Out of Its Silos

For many IT managers and professionals, SOA represents their first attempt to take pieces of applications and make them available across the enterprise enterprise. This is no small task for organizations with longstanding heritages of silos and separate business units, all powered by legacy systems.

In fact, nothing screams "silos" louder than a well-entrenched phone company that has been around for decades, and likely has business processes buried deep, deep, within hardwired systems. In an effort to break this mold, one such telecom, Bell Canada, embarked on an SOA journey four years ago -- long before other companies even were aware of the concept. A new report in Computing Canada describes how it all came together: Bob Noseworthy, vice president of infrastructure and enterprise architecture for Bell Canada, is quoted as saying that the telecom company had a lot of independent business units coming together as part of a consolidation effort. "We did a lot of work four years ago putting together a real, broad enterprise architecture strategy."

Bell Canada is a big, bureaucratic company, so its SOA efforts began modestly. Noseworthy's team started by building a handful of services -- starting with the call center -- that would have a better probability of reuse across the business. "We saw that as a way to learn, get it under our belts, and try to gain some support for that approach," he is quoted as saying, adding that "we have lots of bruises to show for it."

Where did most of these bruises come from? Mainly from trying to overcome internal organization resistance, Noseworthy said. To this day, he added, most organizations -- and their vendors -- are not prepared for the organizational and cultural shifts required for SOA, along with territorial ownership issues. "We were doing this at a time when it was still a very new approach, so there was lots of internal selling," he said.

The internal selling eventually paid off, however. The first call center-based services were eventually reused within the company's public Website and its retail outlets. The Bell Canada team is now concentrating on offering up a list of reusable enterprise services available through a service registry and managed through a governance framework.

Along with business buy-in, challenges include effective governance, change management, performance management, service-level management, and capacity planning for services being made available across the enterprise. "When you start to have multiple business units, multiple delivery teams, all trying to reuse existing services, those kinds of challenges come to the fore," Noseworthy said. "We've done it through trial and error, but it's the school of hard knocks."

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