For the past few years the concept of business agility has been much in evidence in vendors’ SOA marketing materials. It is a good idea to promote agility – clearly SOA can deliver inherently agile applications because it increases loose coupling, and in many ways the marketing of the benefits of service architecture has closer relationship with reality than many forms of IT marketing that frequently rely on hype and superficial nonsense.
As SOA marketing spend diminishes to be overtaken by new kids on the block such as Cloud, Virtualization, Green IT, Social Software, Application Modernization and so on, the business agility message is being used ever more widely. No surprise because there is intense post recession interest in managing change as enterprises drive out costs and reprioritize to focus on new business opportunities.
Yet in many cases the use of the term agility is a stretch. At least SOA marketers could reasonably claim that service based products genuinely would reduce coupling. But the core issue is that business agility is an elusive concept and no one gets held to account because the agility offering is unquantifiable. We might wonder how many buyers of SOA products and services feel in retrospect, and whether with 20:20 hindsight they might consider the claims for agility were over stated!
What’s needed is ways to talk sensibly about the topic of agility. I observe efforts to measure agility by measuring complexity. I don’t agree with this – I think it’s fine to measure relative complexity, but this doesn’t help in the understanding of agility. As an aside, the agile methods community have developed ideas around an agility quotient[i] which assesses 11 factors to assess and rate skills and attitudes relevant to agile delivery. But this is quite different to measuring the agility of delivered application capabilities.
We need a technique to facilitate a rational dialog between business and IT managers on the subject of agility. The dialog needs to be an integral part of business requirements planning – that encourages exploration of where business change may occur, where articulation points need to be, and the type of change that may be required, or not as the case may be.
In this month’s CBDI Journal I propose a technique that develops a relative measure of potential agility. I refer to this as Potential Application Agility (PA2). The measure is developed for business processes and or business capabilities and can be used to analyze change to assess the monetary value of agility in different areas of the business and to create a heat map that can inform architecture work. The PA2 measure then provides a useful input into architecture development effort.
I recommend initially developing an “agility architecture” highlighting Policies, Patterns, Standards and Practices for each of the architecture Views (Business, Specification, Implementation, Deployment and Technology). The agility architecture will form part of the reference architecture and with suitable annotation provide guidance and governance to achieving appropriate levels of agility as indicated by the business analysis.
I anticipate a response that says, “we can’t afford the time to do that sort of analysis; it’s inimical to the agile (project) best practices.” My response is – how can you afford not to undertake this form of analysis. In today’s fast moving world, it’s impossible to bottom out comprehensive business requirements. Rather it’s much more important to figure out the morphology of the application and or service in terms of agility and stability and to deliver a stable foundation that can support appropriate levels of adaptability.
The PA2 analysis can be undertaken in an iterative manner and on progressive levels of detail. Initially it would make sense to do it in outline, and then in time honoured fashion to drill down in areas that merit attention. A few hours of facilitated workshop style discussion with the right stakeholders should be more than adequate to achieve an outline agility analysis, and direct more detailed work into areas of serious business value.
Posts
