There's been a lot of rancor across the industry and blogosphere about the viability of SOA from the top down -- instigated as part of a huge business change -- versus bottom-up, in which individual SOA efforts pop up across business units, with the possibility of federating these efforts down the road.
But, sometimes, it's just so much easier when the CEO is laying down the law. That was the experience with Farm Credit Canada (FCC), a provider of financial services for Canadian agricultural businesses. FCC's approach was very much driven from the top down, instigated by the CEO, who brought in a new CIO specifically to move to SOA. As a result, the establishment of SOA principles for developing and managing applications was in place within 90 days.
FCC employed SOA methodologies to restructure itself from a silo organization, with each silo supporting applications for a particular business function, to a “service-centered” model, where applications are constructed according to service oriented architecture (SOA) principles.
As described in a new report in MIS Quarterly Executive, the transformation of FCC to a process-centric organization is scheduled for completion by the end of 2011. FCC moved to SOA with a six-step process:
1) CEO driven: "The CEO initiated a culture change initiative that underpinned his vision of creating a customer-centric organization."
2) Process revolution: "The organization focused on what needed to be done to integrate the corporation’s processes and systems to enable it to provide a great customer experience."
3) IT itself was transformed. "The CIO assessed the current state of the IT organization, and all current IT projects were halted while this was done." Siloed approaches were abandoned in favor of an architecture-centric approach supported by SOA principles.
4) A proof of concept was undertaken "by implementing a carefully chosen business process with SOA."
5) Governance: "The organization undertook a detailed redesign of other processes, and working through the governance issues of managing a process-driven IT organization."
6) The benefits to date of transforming the IT function and its technology were articulated. The CIO identified a range of benefits, from improved communication between the business and IT, to the development of reusable IT assets.
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