SOA Toddler Syndrome

Been a while since I blogged…life has been busy at work and home.

Anyway both of these have inspired another blog entry on the topic of sharing things.

My children are now 4 and 7 and as you can imagine they argue a lot about sharing toys (actually anything!), and this made me reflect to some of my work experiences trying to get organisations to put in place the required Organisation and Governance structures to encourage people to share IT assets which is at the core of the payback of any SOA/Platform IT strategy.

However you can’t make people share things as I know to my cost with my two children. However depending upon the maturity of the children I have different strategies to encourage sharing.

When they were less than 4 the strategies included :-

Bribery : Offer them some sweets / TV if they share with others
Distraction : Move their attention to something else so the other toy can be used by another child
Time-Out : Remove access to the toy for a short period of time

Now they are over 4 these strategies apply but we can also start to add more subtle strategies like :-

Free Toys : Explaining that if they share their toys they will get access to others toys free of charge
Interesting Games : Explain that if they share more children will want to play more interesting games with them

I am sure I could go on, but the point of this blog is that my very recent experience is that all of these strategies can be applied to change management strategies regarding SOA. However if you have a very immature client the “over 4” strategies may fail as they have not yet learned that simple sharing can bring benefits…before they move to more complex sharing and swapping.