Joined-Up Service Sourcing and Usage

by Paul Allen

While effective service sourcing strategies are absolutely critical for effective outsourcing, they are commonly misunderstood and ill defined. Worse still, the execution of these approaches tends to be somewhat isolated, both from the domain of software architecture and development and the world of business decision making. In this Executive Report by Paul Allen, we take an inclusive approach to service sourcing, explaining in particular how SOA can be used to facilitate decisions on outsourcing and how an SOA center of excellence can work as a unit to join up what are often disparate functions. We take the lid off the service sourcing can and explain how best to organize it in terms of processes, policies, roles, and artifacts.