| Backgrounder: |
It is customary for business managers to blame the generic IT function for lack of flexibility of systems and business processes - it must be said with some justification because the typical enterprise IT environment is incapable of rapid response to change.
For some years it has been obvious that the way out of the mess is to introduce approaches based on architectural level separation where application and infrastructure level capabilities are provided as independent components with rich interfaces that completely encapsulate the underlying complexity and provide some degree of loose coupling and therefore pluggability.
However it would be a major mistake to assume this is purely a technical exercise to re-architect the IT environment into pluggable components which then, as if by magic, turns an inflexible business into an agile, adaptable environment. Better architecture, specifically Service Oriented Architecture, can improve an organization’s inherent flexibility and response to change, but the architecture needs to be based on an understanding of what flexibility is required.
This raises some really important questions:
- What methodology and techniques are appropriate to discover business requirements for flexibility?
- What responsibility should the business have for defining requirements
for future support? |
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