Review the Plan

Typically, organizations report on important technology initiatives in their technical strategy or five-year plan, which usually includes a release strategy. Recently, I was a member of a team that was responsible for updating a five-year technical plan. The plan clearly stated an intention to move to an SOA; however, a technical architecture review of recent implementations revealed no evidence of any progress in that direction. Although, it was not politically correct, as an enterprise architect, I felt compelled to state my findings in the update to the plan. Indeed, a key ingredient to a realistic strategy is to access your organization’s SOA maturity and site any evidence of progress along the way.