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by Eric Marks, Contributing Editor   Agile. Funding. Rarely would you expect to see these words associated with one another. However, the rise of service-oriented architecture (SOA) requires new approaches to funding, and will help bring the two concepts together. As SOA becomes more widely adopted, funding will become a critical enabler. The funding process and associated decisions will set the tenor for an organization's SOA strategy. There are a few basic IT funding models. Most discussions of IT funding first consider centralized versus decentralized approaches, and focus on two areas: What will be funded and who will fund it? A centralized funding model means that IT management has budget authority over such spending and receives input on spending decisions from business units. A decentralized model might distribute funding among centralized IT management and the various business units. In this model, the IT department funds all shared infrastructure, enterprise-wide applications, and telecommunications, and business units fund business applications that pertain to the specific needs of their units. An aspect of IT funding that is rarely addressed -- and intimately connected to SOA implementation -- is its timing. Since IT budgets are handed down during the annual funding process, how are emergent requirements or unanticipated IT expenditures addressed between budget cycles? Can an IT project be funded out of cycle? [Click to continue] |