Section 1.8. The Enterprise IT Renovation Roadmap

1.8. The Enterprise IT Renovation Roadmap

As we have outlined in this introduction, we need strong enterprise architecture concepts to address the structural problems of the enterprise IT landscape, accompanied by a strategy for how to establish the architecture on the organizational level. SOA provides these concepts, but we have to be aware that implementing an architecture like an SOA is an ongoing process, requiring constant guidance and overseeing. The SOA architect needs to bridge many conflicting requirements, resulting from frequent changes of business requirements, the evolution of application and infrastructure technology, and last but not least, changes to the architecture itself. We need ways to introduce step-wise improvements, which will bring us slowly but steadily closer to our goal. We will have to accept that the path we are about to enter will not be a straight path, and there will be many influences outside of our control. Nevertheless, the authors believe that the introduction of an SOA will bring many long-term benefits to an enterprise. Figure 1-4 depicts the overall vision for how our roadmap can bring an enterprise that is suffering from development inefficiencies back to a level of high efficiency and agility.

Figure 1-4. Service-Oriented Architecture is a key element of an enterprise IT renovation roadmap.

This book aims to flesh out an enterprise IT renovation roadmap. This roadmap is not only related to technology, but it also equally addresses organizational challenges. The roadmap anticipates constant changes in strategic directions and assumes that the underlying architecture will have to be constantly adapted to include the results of lessons learned as we go along. Consequently, the three parts of this book are structured to capture these different requirements.

Figure 1-5. An Enterprise IT renovation roadmap needs to address three dimensions: architecture, organization, and real-world experience.

Part I of this book provides the architectural roadmap, mapping out the different expansion stages of an SOA, which will gradually help IT organizations to get back to a high level of agility and efficiency on the technical level.

Part II of this book looks at the organizational roadmap, providing an in-depth discussion of how the architecture can be established on the organizational level, the different stakeholders and how they must be involved, and how an SOA can be leveraged to drive project management more efficiently.

Finally, Part III of this book provides a number of case studies, which provide real-world experiences from large corporations that have already started their journey on the SOA-based enterprise renovation roadmap.