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Q&A with Billy Glennon:
Enterprise SOA and the Intelligent Finance Project
Written by Dirk Slama
Intelligent Finance (IF.com), the telnet bank of Halifax Bank of Scotland, is one of the UK's most successful banking businesses. The entire banking system was planned, designed, and built under the lead of Vision Consulting. With less than one year from initial plan to launch, Vision's challenge was to coordinate over 500 IT staff in 23 different vertical projects to deliver the new bank successfully. In this Interview, Billy Glennon (CEO of Vision Consulting) and Dirk Slama (co-author of "Enterprise SOA") discuss why, from a management point of view, the adoption of SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) was critical to the success of the project.
Slama: Billy, thank you for taking the time for this interview. If I recall it correctly, the last time we met was during the launch of the Intelligent Finance bank in Edinburgh?
Glennon: Yes, I remember - that was a very special day for all of us (laughs). We had just gone through 12 months of extreme pressure and anxiety. Obviously we were all extremely relieved when the first day of operation went nearly without glitches, and the system scaled up easily to the huge load of on-line and telephone customers who opened accounts on that first day.
Slama: You were obviously under a lot of scrutiny?
Glennon: Yes, not only by the Management of Halifax and the financial press - the project made the pages of the Financial Times at least once a month for nearly a year (and on one or two occasions the front page) - but also from the local people. The project had an extreme visibility in Edinburgh. When you left the airport, the first thing you saw was a huge IF.com ad. Everybody in town was constantly talking about it. The millions spent in Edinburgh by people related to the project created an entirely new breed of restaurant in Edinburgh. I believe the Taxi budget alone totaled GBP 2 million. I remember being asked by a Taxi driver once if we had fixed a certain problem with the Mid-Tier. He had obviously overheard a conversation between some engineers earlier on that day. It seemed as if everybody in Edinburgh had taken a personal stake - and for us there was a whole set of concerns to be managed that we never had to manage before.
Slama: What was your initial reaction when Halifax presented you with the plans for this "mission impossible" project?
Glennon: Good question. How often does somebody come into your office, asking if you could build an entirely new bank with a revolutionary new concept for managing customer relationships and say, "By the way, we need your answer in 6 weeks?" My first reaction was to think, "Holy Sh….". This was obviously a once in a lifetime opportunity with all the risks that come attached with something like that. We knew that in the last couple of years we had developed a unique way for delivering projects in a short time, but this really was a moment that tested our conviction. We immediately started our research, and came to the conclusion that we could do it in 12 months. Eventually, Halifax negotiated us down to 9 months, and the rest is history (laughs).
Commitment-Based Management
Slama: Billy, let's talk a little bit about your specific approach to management. What sets you apart from other consulting firms? And how did it help you in this project?
Glennon: Our understanding of management has its roots in philosophy. We try to observe aspects of human behavior often missed by consultants trained in economics, strategy, or organizational design and behavior. We are aiming to change the way organizations work at the levels of systems, projects, processes, whole enterprises, cultures, and cross-firm relations involving power and politics. This capability derives from a new understanding of management and an array of techniques for intervening in management at all levels. We see the basic unit of management as not the economic forecast or analysis but as the simple request a manager makes to a performer and then the personal promise the performer makes back to the manager. Getting these simple requests and promises made responsively to the business situation enables businesses to make radical financial and operational improvements financially.
Slama: You always make the point that enabling trust and commitment is another cornerstone of your approach.
Glennon: Very true. We are strongly leveraging linguistic strategies for forming commitments, which is a prerequisite for enabling a commitment-based organization. Effective management does not focus on clear pictures of the future and directives to achieve it, but on a general sense of direction and the manager's ability to make many requests and negotiate promises with the right people. The future cannot be seen, only created. We intervene to help managers stop trying to see or understand everything in advance. Instead we teach them to make the right kinds of requests and manage multiple promises necessary to create the change they seek.
Slama: Which helps to build a commitment-based organization?
Glennon: Exactly. A commercial enterprise is a network of on-going commitments. For those commitments to be made efficiently and flexibly, the organization has to be designed so that the conversations that lead to the commitments are on-going as well. Our mapping techniques show managers the underlying conversations necessary to produce the required actions quickly.
Slama: You are also using these linguistic strategies for managerial effectiveness between an organization and its customers?
Glennon: Yes. In our experience, all business processes in an organization can be supported or automated in terms of the transactional conversations that initiate processes, drive them, and bring them to completion. Ultimately there are no more than 13 conversational paths for any business transaction, and each step along the path consists of one or another special speech act: an offer or request, a promise, an assessment, or a declaration. These speech acts focus on producing change in the world, not just describing it. That's why they are so important to business.
Slama: What is the benefit of this approach?
Glennon: Firstly, this approach enables us to focus more on the commercial view of transactions than on data flows. Business is about getting things done. By mapping transactional conversations that get things done, everyone involved in developing a system from senior managers to staff and all IT people can speak one language about the system. Secondly, this approach helps us to keep things strategically simple: by mapping the Business Flow in a simple universal language for interaction, we can produce a simplicity that is stable even as a business changes its service or product mix. The same conversation flows can be readily applied in different domains and across domains.
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