Tearing down silos, brick by brick

I once heard a rumor that there actually is a company with two integration teams that actually meet and talk once or twice a year. Just a rumor, mind you.

Lorraine Lawson brought up the whole issue of silos and lack of communication in a recent post, and the implications for SOA. Namely, that SOA not only requires developers to know what other developers are doing, but that the business know what developers are doing, and visa-versa. Lorraine cites the example of one IT professional who had no idea what his coworkers did all day.

This does not bode well for SOA, which is supposed to automagically bring IT and business into alignment, kept in synch by shared services that break through those silos. Repositories and registries may help open the lines of communication and awareness, Lorraine observes, "but even with these technology solutions, how the IT organization interacts internally and with the business is a common problem for SOA implementations."

Lorraine points to a recent post by Eric Roch, who has worked with many companies on their SOA implementations, who advocates the establishment of an SOA competency center, supported by an SOA steering committee, that can serve as a clearinghouse and information center for all matters SOA.

The biggest challenge that such an arrangement may help address is the anti-enterprise tendency to build services that only meet the needs of the one silo. "When an IT functional group creates a service, it generally applies to their silo-ed view of systems. Or, given this limited view, they don’t create functionality as a service, but bury the functionality in the siloed application with no interface at all."

I've also heard it said that competency centers also lift SOA matters above the grind of organizational politics. SOA projects can be prioritized according to the needs of the business at large, and not to serve the agenda of one business unit. Essentially, they can be silo-agnostic. (How's that for a new term?)

However, the challenge is that competency centers are the luxury of the largest companies -- small to medium-size businesses usually can't commit resources or staff time for such an establishment. Of course, SMBs have fewer silos to poke through. But what is needed there is an SOA evangelist who can take some time out of his or her regular job to sell SOA to the business, while keeping the lines open to IT.