The objectives

The CIO responded to the results of the SOA Maturity Assessment by creating an enterprise architect team whose responsibility was to ensure that business needs were clearly reflected in all future IT development efforts, and that the underlying infrastructure was able to scale to meet business demands. The team was also responsible for rationalizing existing systems and services and for reducing or removing redundancy.

One of the first actions for the architecture team was to create a reference architecture that specified a blueprint for all IT systems within Weir & Bell Telecom. The reference architecture supported IT agility by putting SOA at the heart of system development. This would allow the IT department to keep pace with the demands of the business moving forward and facilitate the introduction of new sales channels as identified in the business strategy for growth.

The enterprise architecture team also set out clear objectives for SOA Governance. Moreover, it was...