12.1. READY ... FIRE ... AIM?
Everyone who has been in the business world for more than six months has been involved in at least one project that was ill-conceived. Rather than taking the time-tested ready-aim-fire approach, they take a more haphazard ready-fire-aim approach.
Ready-Aim-Fire (a solution based on defined requirements)
Acquiring needed resources (ready)
Identifying requirements, performance metrics, and crafting a project plan (aim)
Executing on the plan (fire)
Ready-Fire-Aim (a solution in search of a problem)
Acquiring needed resources (ready)
Rapidly moving forward to implement some new technology/ methodology/technique/product (fire)
Evaluating the results and then deciding what the business drivers and ultimate utilization of the project will be moving forward (aim)
There is a tendency for people to get overly excited about new solution sets and then look around for where they could possibly apply that solution. Many people fall into this trap with SOA. This is a recipe for disaster. The approach outlined here is intended to help business leaders to systematically guide the evaluation and pragmatic adoption of SOA. SOA is not a panacea and should not be applied haphazardly. It is a powerful enterprise architecture style that has tremendous potential to facilitate alignment between business and information technology (IT) and deliver a compelling return on your technology and organizational investments.
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