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The best strategy for staffing enterprise service-oriented architecture initiatives can take surprising turns.
Many companies are pursuing service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives. Such projects demand personally with proven SOA skills. The challenge is to find the right skills and retain it.
This requires a new approach. Companies need to balance geographically dispersed employees, outsourcing personnel and expert consultants to create a global developmental team.
Here the old tactics of rote outsourcing, hiring consultants and re-hiring for new skills will not work instead companies need to “re-skill” or retrain their existing resources. By investing in skills development, training and education, companies can transform to a service- based infrastructure.
Decision to Re-skill:
Changing the model to SOA requires long term strategic investing and planning. But once it’s underway it’s worthwhile all the trouble. Unlike many other outsourcing initiatives where process is secondary to end results, SOA needs laser-like focus on all the methods and practices of creating and supporting service.
Recognizing this reality, companies are retraining its employees for SOA model. A survey of 150 businesses and IT executives by GCR Custom Research LLC shows that more than 31 percent of all SOA budget are spent on re-skilling the existing staff resources. It was also found that nearly half of all companies are spending more than $1 million on SOA initiatives. So companies are spending an average of $310,000 on SOA skills development and training.
Most companies do not postpone training efforts until they expand their SOA initiatives. In the GCR research, re-skilling accounted for 27 percent of the budget for SOA projects costing less than $500,000. Once SOA spending crossed $1 million, the percentage dedicated to training fell to only 19 percent. As SOA maturity grows, the cost of education falls.
Cultivate SOA Skills
Successful re-skilling shifts the view of technical personnel from strictly functional considerations to cross-enterprise concerns. For example, an enterprise architect who originally might have focused on infrastructure details may now need to help business users understand how and why using IT services can benefit the organization.
Adopting following practices can help:
Deploy five new or redefined roles.
Re-skilling for enterprise SOA requires deployment of new roles and redefining existing roles within the IT organization. This change must be executed incrementally, minimizing disruption and resistance.
New roles include an IT executive, who acts as the "manager" and leads the SOA charge; the enterprise architect, a " planner" who drives the technical and design requirements; a service architect, the "building code engineer" who sees to architectural consistency throughout service design; service engineers, the "building contractors" who oversees the creation and assembly of services; and the developers and administrators, the "builders" who will develop and maintain service-based applications.
Redefined roles are required when functions change in scope and responsibility to meet new business requirements. For example, documentation and quality assurance groups may need to take on new responsibilities while retaining their original titles.
Plan to accelerate re-skilling strategy.
Efficiently re-skilling staff requires the execution of three steps. First, define the organizational model you want to achieve over time. Which skill sets are necessary to the company? Then, define existing baseline: which skills are currently available, and which are lacking? Finally, create a plan for changing the total skill set over time.
Once training needs are understood, companies can pursue an SOA model by role. Depending on the learner's needs and availability, this education can be delivered in hours to weeks by experts in a classroom setting or using computer-based, self-paced training.
Set core standards.
Deployment of personnel resources depends on the organization's global sourcing strategy. Yet successful deployment can be assured only when core standards and governance are in place. These standards must include defined job skills requirements that are incorporated into company job descriptions and incentive structures.
With these standards in place, companies are prepared to make specific global sourcing decisions. Insourcing such elements as SOA architecture and governance services are best practices that help SOA run smoothly. In addition, certain design services and critical services builds are most effective when done in-house.
Use external help judiciously.
Completing all retraining efforts before beginning enterprise SOA deployments is not necessary. In fact, hiring professional service consultants, process experts or outsourcing the entire development center can, in the right circumstances, effectively help a company get immediate skill set help and drive necessary change, while minimizing disruption.
It is critical, however, to ensure that this external knowledge is transferred to internal staff. Properly planned and used, external expertise can serve as an excellent source for on-the-job training, mentoring, and skills transfer.
Review the changes incorporated.
Re-skilling cannot be completed overnight, but the change should be quantifiable. Whether the organization uses certification levels, testing or compliance to standards as a yardstick, progression on the skills change plan must be transparent and must move steadily toward the final goal.
Careful mix for best results
Re-training plan must include present and future ability to serve the business. This effort has costs attached but the alternative is untenable. Only when companies take ownership of their SOA deployments can service-based initiatives flourish. By blending employee re-training with appropriate outsourcing and hiring of external consultants and structured knowledge transfer, companies can support the transformation to a service-based infrastructure with minimum cost and maximum efficiency. Retraining the workforce is an investment. The final analysis, however, poses only one question: can you afford to ignore re-skill?.
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