Service Delivery
Dan Foody of Progress Software has a great post entitled “The SOA Glass Ceiling” that brings up a familiar topic- the service lifecycle. He states:
If you only take away one thing from this blog its that in SOA you don’t build services, you deliver services.
What was particularly interesting to me was the discussion around product delivery. I’ve always used the analogy of a product manager when discussing the service lifecycle, and it would seem that Dan’s article shoots a big hole in this analogy. In reading into it, however, it doesn’t. Dan describes product delivery as this:
…you roll out a service, and at a later date (6, 9, 12 months later) you roll out the next version, and the software development lifecycle continues.
Inside of most enterprises, I’d actually argue that this is an improvement. Because what’s really happening is that all of the efforts are disjoint. Most likely, there may not be a next version, and when there is, it’s a completely new set of people that lack the context of the original team. The management was project management, not product management. Dan is in agreement, as he states:
IT organizations are used to building applications for the business, shipping them, and going on to the next (typically) unrelated thing to build.
I like the notion of Service Delivery. Obviously, building and deploying the service is a part of it. But to do it properly, the entire Service Lifecycle must be managed, and it’s not strictly about project management of the development efforts for each version. It’s also about observing how customers are using the service, marketing the service out to the enterprise, providing excellent support when expectations are not met, establishing contracts to ensure expectations are clear from the beginning, and much more.
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