Enterprise Initiatives

In a previous post (Another Benefit of SOA - Career Path) I talked about how SOA can create a career path that consists of specialized technical jobs.


We just launched the requirements and development stage of our BPM/SOA implementation. We partnered with my buddy Eric Roch and company to assist in the implementation. We brought in specialists for each layer of the architecture. The specialists include a Web Designer for the presentation layer, a Process Analyst for the business process layer, SOA architects, a project manager, and my own architects (Software, Data, Network, and Test) who know the business and the existing infrastructure.

The first day was for introductions, general admin and housekeeping tasks, and a kick off. Today was day two. The first draft of the UI and the business process model was completed today! This was accomplished because we specialized or to put another way, we had experts assigned to specific technologies. My architects are incredible talents but they are not experts at UI development or business process modeling. Had I tried to tackle this internally it would probably have taken us 2 weeks instead of 2 days.

Another reason for the success is that the resources are 100% dedicated to the project and live in a "war room" where they have access to all of the people they need. We bring users and technicians into the war room when needed and never have to worry about meeting schedules. We will also follow an iterative approach and deliver weekly builds so the users can touch and feel the application early and often. This allows us to make changes on the fly and keep the users involved throughout the life cycle.

All that in the first 2 days! I will recap our progress each week and share the good, bad, and ugly as we encounter it.