Friday, September 16, 2005

Extended Service Portfolio Management

A few months back I came across a great blog entry:

"At a fundamental level, the radical shift to SOA calls for a different mindset – a dramatically different one at that. The adoption of SOA shall signify itself to be an important development in the IT world. Software will be described as a portfolio of capabilities and possibilities instead of modularized applications. Data models will be standard-based and externalized to enable interworking between services, and data will be considered to be like any other form of "digital content" ever ready for exchange and transformation between systems."

Guys like Frank Martinez, Carlos Perez and John Udell have discussed the value of creating services whereby they may be recombined in a manner that was unintended at design time, 'unintended recombinants' if you like. Services were meant to be used, reused and reused in manners which the design never intended. Services that were designed correctly hold a special latent value - they hold the value of recomposition, both at design time and perhaps more importantly at runtime.

As large organizations perform Service Portfolio Management, they are beginning to notice that certain service designs enable reuse and recomposition. Nothing new here. However, as the service ecosystem begins to grow the Portfolio Manager will spend less time on their current 'service capability view' and more on the 'service possibility view'. Here, the goal is to evaluate opportunity.

The Service Portfolio Manager must become a specialist not only in enterprise refactoring but also in shopping and procurement. Services will be built, bought, leased and borrowed. Recombining services, from anywhere, for value-add solutions is at the heart of a Service Oriented Enterprise.

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