SOA and Linakges with Service Strategy

On whether can you do service strategy on its own without caring for other strategies:

While reviewing the book on service strategy in its initial draft, I could not notice help noticing how there are inadvertently two notions of a strategy -esp for shared services IT departments like us. We have several business units each having its own IT strategy and then obviously our own IT strategy. A lot of relevance of Service Strategy book can be found focusing very well on second type of IT strategy carrying forward the themes from each BU.

Lets first look at how most IT Strategist define an IT Strategy. Typically in context of relevant aspects of what and how business wants to execute its own strategies we develop two main components: Application Startegy and Operations strategy. Underpinning these are three other areas: Enterprise architecture - a connected view of what current and future state IT looks like, Decision Making guidelines - Governance rules regarding investments underlying all the application, operations change plan decided and a resourcing plan agreed with the BU.

It seems obvious to anyone that you cannot have a standalone operations startegy call it service strategy if you like or not. And obviosuly you would have noticed from previous posts on this blog that even seemingly harmless decisions like SOA as core design philosophy for business can have radical impact on the operations side - be it tooling, process, resources, reporting etc.

So It needs to be argued that service strategy cannot be done on its own in isolation and requires coordination of overall IT strategy.


On Consolidated Service Portfolio:
we talked about service portfolio plan in its own isolation wrt SOA earlier in this blog. Service strategy book nicely also talks about service portfolio which is not just a catalogue of what is operational, but also what can be potentially offered. I would suggest that the SOA SPP and the Operations SPP have to be merged in near future. It is also not uncommon to include technical services (aka IT services) in SOA SPP in mature organization so that IT as a whole can present business, technical and consulting service portfolio together - there are many views to the same - some focusing on a BU and some are more holistic in nature.