Enterprise Application Success

Just catching up from the lovely long weekend – fully unplugged even my Treo was off.

I follow James Governor’s blog and he has a great post on Where and How SOA works: Some Buckets. Here are his observations:

1. They have a single person ultimately responsible for SOA who
leads a larger steering committee. This group also attacks
organizational and process changes.
2. They created a roadmap with realistic deadlines.
3. They have an EA group where all of the members understand SOA and
understand the practical needs of the application architects with
regard to SOA.
4. The Application Portfolio Governance group has created a "SOA work
stream" and selected new applications are sent down an SOA path.
5. The downstream teams (project managers, analysts, app. architects,
designers, coders & testers) have all been trained in SOA.

The interesting thing about this is that the observations he added from Jeff Schneider’s post could be easily applied to any Enterprise Application implementation.  So I have taken the liberty to change them to Enterprise Data Warehousing (EDW) ones:

1. They have a single person ultimately responsible for Enterprise Data (Federated and Centralized) who
   leads a larger steering committee. This group also attacks
   organizational and process changes.
2. They created a roadmap with realistic deadlines – and communicate it often.
   
3. 
   They have an Enterprise Architecture group where all of the members understand Business Intelligence and
   understand the practical needs of the business and other IT areas with
   regard to Data.
4. 
   The Application Portfolio Governance group has created a "EDW work
   stream" and decided which areas to centralize first and how to embrace areas that are not centralized.
5. 
   The downstream teams (project managers, analysts, app. architects,
   designers, coders & testers) have all been trained in the guiding principles and realities of the EDW roadmap.