4.1.5: Change Initiative
Appropriately Plan and Fund the Change Initiative Other Information:
In order to initiate and sustain any change initiative, sufficient on-going planning, funding and resource allocation must
occur. Another challenge for an SOA-based implementation is funding the necessary infrastructure, which can represent a large
expense that is not easily associated with a specific program. Organizations need to identify a means to align continuing
enterprise infrastructure funding with the needs of the SOA implementation. Given the scope and importance of the targeted
initiative, it is reasonable to build these incremental costs into its business case. The amount of funding necessary depends
on the maturity of the organization, its strategy for implementing SOA and its overall objectives. In addition, while highlighting
the full cost via an integrated business case, it is important to capture the benefits as outlined elsewhere in this document.
For more mature organizations, SOA reuse and agility result in cost savings. Organizations need to plan proactively to identify
and harvest the savings – for reinvestment in additional SOA capabilities, to enable additional mission or business performance
improvements, or to reallocate resources outside IT. A significant integration of SOA into an agency environment can take
a long time. It may be years before the point of cost savings through reusable services can be reached. Once it is reached,
savings can grow exponentially. Our recommendation is to highlight the full scope of costs and benefits by leveraging the
agency EA through segment architectures. This approach will highlight overall opportunities for reuse, information sharing,
reduced duplication, and overall cost effectiveness as well as clearly delineate the full spectrum of investments required
and how they interrelate. It will produce a full and proactive picture of the federated governance structures required, and
how they relate to existing governance bodies and processes. Perhaps most importantly, by leveraging natural partitions evident
via the architecture, the implementation challenges can be decomposed into a smaller number of lower risk steps that form
a natural roadmap to the target outcomes.
Indicator(s):
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