Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Vilas recently posted on centralized service delivery teams (SDTs), and invited others to share their experiences. I haven’t posted on this subject in some time, and as I thought about it, I realized that my opinions have evolved.

Why would an organization consider a centralized team? Frankly, I think it comes down to governance. It’s far easier to achieve consistency within a single group than it is across many groups. But what are the downsides to this approach? Probably the biggest one, and the one of most concern when adopting SOA, is the that of business domain knowledge. While it’s probably relatively easy to pick and choose from among the development staff to get a set of people with broad technical knowledge, it will probably be more difficult to find people with broad business knowledge. What will be more important to your SOA efforts? Technical consistency (i.e. all services are Web Services) or business consistency? The answer will probably vary based on whether you see SOA as primarily as a technology integration solution, or if you see SOA as a business agility solution.

Personally, if I had to pick one over the other, I’m more interested in the business agility aspects. I hope I don’t have to pick one, however, because the technology integration aspects are not something to be dismissed. What does that mean? It means I’d take the key experts on the business domain for a service rather than having the technical experts. Given this preference, it certainly means that a staff augmentation model for service development may make the most sense, rather than an outsourcing model. In this approach, we’d have a pool of technical experts that would be allocated to service development efforts, with the work managed by those projects, rather than by a manager of the pool. In this way, service ownership can be established from the beginning, and that owner will be the person who understands the business domain and the needs of the consumers of that domain. This is very important, as we need to shift the organization from being concerned about development lifecycles (end with the project) to service lifecycles (end when service is decommissioned). An outsourcing model of development is focused on the development lifecycle only, and can easily result in services going into limbo after the initial development effort.

Now there is one caveat to this. Organizations that may be considering a centralized service development team may not have any understanding at all of service ownership. It’s likely that the project that needs the service is building the service consumer. Assigning a resource to this project to perform service development does not do what I’ve described, because the project is not the service owner. The project manager is not the service manager. Who is it, then? Well, that has to be determined, and if the organization doesn’t have any teams that are prepared to act in this capacity, they’ll need to create one. It’s important to define this team according to business domains not technology domains, presuming we’re talking about business services and not technology services (like Security Services). This is where the needs may challenge the current organizational structure. New teams will likely need to be formed. Are these “centralized” teams? These teams may wind up living in the organization for a long time, unlike a Competency Center or Center of Excellence type approach. If anything, the Center of Excellence may be the group that is the one making these organizational and ownership decisions and thus beginning the organizational transformation that will occur. The COE may not be the group building the services, but they may be the group with the appropriate breadth of experience and knowledge to make the necessary decisions to set the organization in the right direction for the future. If there are five teams that all conceivably be the service owner, which one do you pick?

As these decisions are made, the center of excellence will disappear, but the new service development organization will now be in place, where there are groups dedicated to service creation as well as groups dedicated to the creation of user-facing systems. How many organizations that have “adopted SOA” have reached this point of maturity in their efforts?