Section 3.1. Conceiving

3.1. Conceiving

In Enterprise Services Architecture (Woods and Mattern, O'Reilly), the first book written on this subject, we described the process of The Big Think. This informal process of understanding the nature of your systems and determining where to apply ESA has been thoroughly formalized and surrounded by service offerings. The process of creating an ESA roadmap helps create a coherent plan that incorporates moves in the infrastructure and application dimensions into a change management program prioritized to maximize impact on business strategy and minimize risk. Skills in modeling of the business and modeling for development of processes and user interfaces (UIs) are usually acquired early on. The ability to use traditional development tools for ABAP and Java plays its proper role in service creation.

However, the organization must change its attitude and structure. Projects do not result in just another automated process, but rather, another set of services that will help automate other processes in the future. This is an investment. Learning which services are available in the Enterprise Services Repository is another sort of investment, one made easier by the search and modeling tools. Learning the skills to compose new applications is yet another investment. As we will see, the organization must change to manage these investments and skills properly.

The culture of no must also be overcome. When the answer to new ideas has been no for too long, people don't waste their time proposing ideas anymore. But even after a small program of service enablement, the answer will be yes more often. Companies must then find a way to turn on and manage brainstorming so that innovation becomes part of the culture.