As you begin analyzing a business process that significantly affects the enterprise, you have several tasks that sometimes overlap. You must collect information about the business, including details on the current process and on the reasons for change. You must negotiate with personnel who have a stake in the process. Last, you must recommend solutions that make sense for the long term. Regardless of how you complete these tasks, the human element is crucial. A workable methodology
involves a senior business executive
to help identify which personnel are of interest
to ensure that those personnel are made available
includes a relatively short period of one-on-one information gathering, as you
conduct interviews
read documents
divide the areas of interest into different business areas and, within business areas, into different technology areas (for example, software on a mainframe as compared to software on Linux)
identifies the most obvious service points, which are
the business tasks that can be mirrored by integration and business services
the technical tasks that can be implemented by relatively low-level services
seeks ways to bring the company's application portfolio into an SOA. In particular, you may leave at least some of the existing applications in place and create technology-specific software adapters, which allow for data exchange between your newly written services and a traditional application such as a COBOL program that runs on a mainframe.
emphasizes use of facilitated sessions, which are meetings in which you direct a conversation to define the current process (often described differently by different people) and to define the future direction and time frame.
includes times when you refine plans and develop ways to communicate them
concludes with the company's approving designs for a set of services (some of which are of general value to the business and will be usable in applications yet to be designed) and for a set of service-oriented applications that address the company's near-term needs.
Your task may be to pull together the processes of different parts of the company or of several companies. In that circumstance, rather than working with one manager who gives final approval, you'll be working with multiple managers who will make individual decisions about what is required. In addition, you're all but assured of handling data that, although similar in meaning, is defined differently by different groups. For example, the customer address used by a marketing group may include multiple contacts, yet an accounting group requires only one legal contact. Similarly, different groups in an airline may refer to cities differently, as when some systems store an airport code and others a city name, which itself may vary (in the early 1990s, the names Leningrad and Saint Petersburg were both in use).
The differences in data can be more subtle. At an airline, for example, different groups may define the meaning of flight differently (the fact of boarding, or the fact that a plane leaves the gate, or the duration from departure to arrival). Your task will include interviewing people from the different groups to define the differences and to work out ways to mediate the differences.