“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.” Galls Law

The first step in creating a lean enterprise is to first assess all your systems. Find out where these systems overlap and then see if these can be integrated. You would be surprised how much functionality and data is duplicated across your enterprise environment. In some cases the duplication is needed, but in the vast majority of cases the processes can be streamlined through either automated processes or removing the duplicate areas altogether.

In a perfect world, all applications would be custom developed so that truly relational models can take hold in an enterprise. However in the real world, we have to deal with pre-packaged applications, vendor applications, client applications, legacy systems and finally custom applications.

Give me Service Oriented Architecture!

Don’t look at your projects as separate applications. Look at them as divisions of a larger system, these divisions can be compartmentalized. Each compartment can take care of a specific function within the larger enterprise application. These functions can then be accessed through your custom applications. Areas where you have overlapping information and/or functionality can be greatly reduced because you’re using the same code base for functionality. “Is that all SOA is? ” The short answer is yes, the long answer is no.

SOA is a tool for creating a compartmentalized system, but there are many aspects to SOA that I won’t get into, such as requiring specific uses of technology to achieve your architectural masterpiece.

But I have a system that can’t use SOA principles?!?

There are many cases where you cannot specifically build SOA entirely into your system. Third-party software is a great example of that. In many cases, with web especially, these can be some of the most difficult applications to work with. Sometimes you can request customization from your application provider. This is the best case scenario because they are the ones who know their software best. Sometimes however that is not an option; in those cases you can build applications that will do that for you. Check out http://www.teraeon.com/tleaf.aspx to find out more information on how Teraeon Consulting provides a solution to this specific problem.

In our experience, when we work with a client we became intimately involved with their process. We figure out the ins and outs, identify how to streamline it and provide an implementation. This helps give our customers a little bit of clarity out of complex seemingly random set

Tags: Internet Consulting, IT Consulting, Lean, Service Oriented Architecture, Six Sigma., SOA Business Process Improvement

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 8:16 pm and is filed under Business Process Improvement, Business Technology, E-commerce, Web Applications, Web Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.