Businesses succeed by bringing new products and services to market. It is a constant Darwinian cycle where businesses either adapt to meet market conditions or they die. Competitive advantage is only temporary as competitors race to match and exceed their rivals. As technology plays a larger role in the evolution of business, its intelligent use remains a significant competitive advantage. And while technology for its own sake is important, it must be leveraged to advance the business objectives that drive a company to capture new business opportunities. To this end, technology must enable the business quickly to seize new opportunities before its competitors have time to react.

Given these conditions, business strategy drives I.T. investment; the closer one can align business objectives with I.T. enablement, the quicker it can bring the right product or service to market. Therefore, it is imperative that I.T. is driven by the business, and I.T. must be agile enough to realize the business vision in the desired time frame. This is the goal of the latest I.T. technologies that center around the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). And while these principles can be applied to other technologies, SOA provides the competitive advantage that enables business agility.

For most companies an adaptive I.T. Architecture allows them to spot market opportunities and build new functionality or leverage existing functionality in a new way to seize these opportunities. So while these new technologies provide a potential quicker time to market, they also add another level of complexity since the entire organization must adapt to fulfill the promise. This flexibility is achieved by realigning I.T. around business services. These business services represent small pieces of business functionality that can be reused again and again to meet the demands of the business. While this sounds quite simple, it adds more complexity for the I.T. organization since it has to manage the way it conducts work in much finer detail.

Software reuse is a corporate dream since it reduces the software development dollars necessary to build new applications and enables I.T. to bring new applications to life with amazing speed. Of course, to understand how much is gained by software reuse, the organization has to measure how much reuse is achieved. Unless you can measure it, you can’t prove it. Measurement requires oversight, and oversight requires a mechanism to capture the required metrics. So while this adds overhead, experts estimate an 80% cost savings in software development dollars.

While reusable services provide a great benefit to the software development organization they also add complexity since these services need to be managed. Management consists of not only maintaining an inventory of services, but also other aspects such as performance. This means that I.T. Operations need to measure how well these services perform in order to understand how they can be leveraged for other purposes. Given that most large organizations should have Service Level Agreements (SLA) with their business partners, these performance measurements are a critical aspect since most business processes will consist of several reusable services.

To successfully implement this I.T. strategy requires a support organization that has a wider breadth of experience and expertise then the typical I.T. Operations structure. What is required is an organizational structure that spans the complete application lifecycle. Such an organization is show below.

A matrixed organization as illustrated above has the skill set to understand and manage the complexity of implementing such a solution.

This section has covered some of the business aspects of how to organize for success. Please see the “Services” section for the technical aspects as to how these goals are accomplished.