Impact of SOA on Infrastructure and Operations

Conceptual Impact Items:

(.) Recognize that the notion of application as business service is being replaced By SOA business services

(.) Move to Business Service Management rather than IT Service Management – rather than just manage IT as Business, be part of Business is the challenge

(.) Inherent Dynamicity in SOA environment – what is a called chain today can dynamically alter tomorrow for good reasons

(.) Feedback loops on QoS achievement of service back into development time is important for people reusing the service. Cannot be an afterthought

(.) Reworking of SLAs to change focus from managing SD own risk to Business risks and policies

Benefits

(+) Role of service manager responsible for a domain of services from transition, operations and improvement perspective will come into limelight

(+) Better and tighter integration expected between service operations/transition teams with solution development teams

(+) SOA is the basis for enabling BSM and allowing service delivery to make this leap in easier way than traditional model

Negatives

(-) Far more complicated environment to manage with lot of moving parts and complicated Infrastructure

(-) Chargeback for FTE deployed to manage applications today will be shaken up as the shared service model will now extend to software further complicated the resources deployed to manage the same. Eventually this will get simplified as the execution on services will determine the chargeback between business units and within IT as well.

(-) Expecting a single consolidated product set of policy management and monitoring at the same time from Mega Vendors is not going to happen in near future.

(-) Change management and release management for services is order of magnitudes more complicated than traditional applications