Philippe, making the right choice for the context

Who is Philippe?

Philippe has been active in IT-world for about 20 years. In those early days, there was little to no proper education in informatics. But he's a civil engineer, so he has a thorough foundation in the area of mathematics, plain logic, technology...

However, the real "savoir faire", he had to learn on the job. Indeed, he has been programming, gathering requirements, testing, analyzing, synthesizing, modeling, architecting, building frameworks, performing R&D, teaching, mentoring, auditing, (yes, there is still a lot to learn after graduating!)... ; all this at both ends of the fence, namely at customers and at providers. He has been working in Flanders, Wallonia, Brussels, the Netherlands, France... Over the years, he has been in charge of individuals, teams, projects, departments and so he developed quite good communication and leading skills. In short: IT has no secrets for him anymore.

His main passion, after all those years, is still business and technical architecture.

What has Philippe been doing lately?

Since last year, Philippe is in charge of the overall technical architecture of a project called Omega, at customer X. The project is a-typical since it involves applications that used to be in several individual silos. The customer has recently elaborated a new five year plan. A roadmap is available, but this is little more than a strategic exercise. Tactical choices and implementation matters still lay open.In the mean while, a large reorganization of the IT-department is on going: whereas IT used to be business-unit-oriented, the new way of working will be ITIL-based.

Just another day for Philippe

Today another day-to-day question is put to him: some interfacing application needs to know what technical constraints apply to their new communication with the Omega project. It looks like a simple question and it seems fair to state that an experienced architect should be able to answer it quickly. It would be the kick-off of a well-guided program-by-contract approach for the communication between the two applications.

"Interapplication-programming-by-contract": good thinking. One point for the questioneer; he is a happy man; the company he is working for adapts to best practices.

Still, Philippe knows that this is not just 'a' question. The context this question was put in, needs some attention. Keeping in mind the Enterprise Architecture of the company - vaguely present in the strategic exercise - he needs to know a lot more before formulating an answer. Questions such as:

• What does the business actually want to do with this information?
• How would the information ideally flow through the company, where and how would it contribute to the business results?
• Where should the real responsibility of this information reside and who will act as data-owner?
• What about changes and information quality?
• What about security? Is this all skipped just due to the fact that the information is requested by an application?
• ...

just popup into his head.

Of course, most of those questions did not get an answer that day. And yes, he was constantly aware of the urgent nature of a practical solution (moreover, it soon proved to be a valid request). But a few workshops and brainstorm sessions later, it was decided that this request would justify trying something new: the installation of the very first embryo of the company's Service Bus. And no, they did not start with a full-blown out-off-the-shelf solution; they just built a simple broker with some translation, some intelligent monitoring and basic registering capabilities. This simple solution was chosen on the one hand to get their technical and business requirements concerning SOA more clear using a real-life test case in their own context and on the other hand to meet their project deadlines (after all, some stakeholders need to pay for it!). He also achieved in defining some new roles within the organization: information owners at the business side and service owners at IT side were defined and installed.

When he now looks back to that period of time, he feels confident. This was one of the first concrete small steps the company took in actually realizing its strategic plan.