It’s SOA Time: Do You Know What Services Your Customers Need?

Service-Oriented Architecture is finally coming of age. Those of you who are designing or refining your SOA strategies shouldn’t ignore many of our early reports on this topic. Many of the best “how to’s” and conceptual overviews were written by Brenda Michelson. Brenda is now the Principal, Business Technologist, of Elemental Links. You can check out her blog and Web site for an update on her activities. Now, thanks to Brenda’s evangelism and that of many other enterprise architects, SOA is finally becoming a best practice in IT enterprise architecture to support the design of adaptive applications and infrastructure.

However, if you want your organization to have a CUSTOMER-adaptive architecture, you’ll want to take an “OUTSIDE INnovation” approach to designing your Services-Oriented Architecture. The good news is that Brenda and I collaborated a number of years ago (2005!) on developing such a methodology. We used customer co-design techniques with our proven Customer Scenario® Mapping interactive design tools to capture customers’ “Ideal State” scenario designs. Then we identified the customer-critical services and used Brenda’s service classification scheme to help the technology architects on the co-design team correctly identify and describe these customer-critical services.

Brenda and I were a bit ahead of our time back in 2005. We think that many folks may finally be ready to take advantage of this streamlined and powerful technique. So this week, I’m re-offering her seminal report, entitled Service Discovery Using Customer Scenario Mapping.