IT Intelligence
One of the topics that I don’t see discussed much in the context of SOA is business intelligence. I’m not talking about the traditional use of business intelligence tools, I’m talking about using business intelligence tools to the business of IT.
SOA has been described as a movement from building for longevity (built to last) to building for change. While that’s a great description, it doesn’t give any help in answering the question of how to build for change. Therein lies the challenge. We can only guess what new requirements may come along in the future. In some cases, the change may be very apparent, such as a merger or acquisition. In other cases, however, things may move very slowly over time. By the time the changes have become apparent, IT may already be behind the curve in supporting it. How do we shift the odds in the favor of IT?
I think one answer to this is through the collection and analysis of service interactions. The data acquired from the analysis completes the feedback loop back into the architecture to initiate change. Just as the business must monitor its performance through key indicators and make changes accordingly, so must IT monitor its own performance and make changes. It needs to go beyond traditional system measurements around resource utilization, however. We need to understand the patterns of access across applications, and the relationship of those patterns to business and market activities. Services represent key collection points of information to be funneled into the analytical engine, and get the necessary feedback to move the architecture from a static, time-boxed view, to a dynamic, ever-changing view.
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