Blog

Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture

June 7th, 2011

Information Architecture, Marketing, Strategy, User Experience Design, UX Design

During a recent solution strategy session for one of our large enterprise clients, a need developed for creating visual prototypes and simulations illustrating the end-state of the enterprise system to be built. The system, or really “solution” (since the ROI would be derived not only from IT, but also from organizational change, process re-engineering, and physical and digital asset value realization), included many audiences and stakeholder roles plus many distinct (though integrated) business services. “Services” is the key term here, not “applications” or “websites”.  These business services are used by customers, governed by the company through managed agreements, and supported by information technology.

The best practice Service-oriented architecture (SOA) methodologies separate business concerns from underlying fulfillment concerns in a manner that enables reuse and evolution of each, as well as maximizes ROI. Business service architecture strategies begin frequently with the “What” (scope and nature of the business service offered), the “Who” (participants in the service agreement) and operate constrained by the “Why” (i.e., ROI objectives drive performance measures and limitations, KPIs, etc.). “How”, “when”, “where”, “which” and all other implementation questions follow these first three concerns.

For netcentric services, such as those business services intended to be delivered leveraging networked, digital technologies and content (like websites), the User Experience (UX) should be considered both in the strategy and business requirements and in the implementation. Great UX is a corporate asset, and a positive, useful experience is itself a business service.  As such, a successful online capability created with SOA principles requires early UX insight, and a successful UX is best associated with an SOA approach to the business service design. Best practices in SOA and UX are inexorably linked for successful online services.

So, in constructing a services architecture to fulfill business objectives, the first step includes Services Identification, usually approached from a “Business Domain” perspective. Let’s say the Domain is “Customer Support”, and the business objective is to enable more customers to derive value from ongoing support dialogue. This objective should lower the number of commonly repeated service requests and decrease the time it takes for the company’s stakeholders to alert the company to “root-cause” information concerning incidents (i.e. customers may find they have similar problems, and offer different, additional information after viewing what others are discussing). The new business service is “online self-service knowledge management”, or from the Marketing Team perspective, the “Social Help Desk”.

This business service has a few subordinate, composite services, like an automated process for “incident discovery and alerting”, a manual “live chat” service, and an application component to “search for issues like yours”. The developing inventory and relationship of services isn’t constrained by or prescribing specific technology, even though the end-state definition of the service will be informed by the technology context (i.e. define something we can actually buy or build, within budget and compliance).

The roles involved at this stage of an SOA project include those like “Solution Architect”, “Enterprise Architect”, “Business Architect” and “SOA or Functional Architect,” who all help to identify layers of reusable, independently-governed and measurable services that make sense in the overall Enterprise investment context.

What about the business service provides a great customer experience? This is certainly a measurable business objective, and should be a service that supports the successful delivery of service like “Live Chat”. Unless great UX is the actual, independent outcome to be delivered, it is a service component of the broader, composite business services. The “live chat” service may include a tailored UX service, for example.

But what is this compelling UX service made of? For live chat, it may include reusable items, like common branding, buttons, navigation anchors or feedback signals. It may also include custom UX elements for this specific business service, like a Chat window frame design, a “click-to-share” interactive metaphor, or a “communications status” dashboard interface, not found anywhere else in the overall provision of the Social Help Desk.

In all of this, the most important thing to consider in the definition and initial design is that UX services are both mapped effectively to the corresponding definitions of the business services, and are themselves defined with reuse in mind.