Can you describe your enterprise architecture at Comcast?
I think of enterprise architecture [EA] as business architecture. So I don't think of technology tools; I think about billing, ordering, customer service, human resources and payroll. To me, those are the components, and understanding how I want to break down business functions into macro-level services and understanding the relationships between them is what creates my enterprise architecture. Some people think of enterprise architecture more along the lines of enterprise technical architecture, meaning what the standard middleware software package is going to be across the enterprise, for example. And yes, I have that, and yes, that also relates to SOA, but to me that's not as important as business architecture.
EA is also a road map to make sure that every project we do is in the context of the architecture vision. Our enterprise architecture identifies all the various technology components that we need to run our business, but its purpose isn't just to paint a future vision — it also attempts to eliminate redundancy across projects. So if you take two projects and put them in the context of this enterprise architecture, you may see that they are related to the same component in your enterprise architecture. So you may want to combine the projects [or stop one of them].
In companies like ours, you don't build 100 percent of what you're deploying; you're buying a lot of it. And, unlike developing the applications yourself, not every vendor is going to deliver the components you need to meet your enterprise architecture vision in the technology stack.
Can you talk a bit more about your vision for SOA?
I'll give you the big functional components. Billing is one. Provisioning — setting up cable TV in a new customer's home, for example — is another big area where we have already made quite a bit of progress. Many of our provisioning systems have been deployed in an SOA model of services, which helps us then build the composite end to end.
[Cable] network management is another focus of SOA. We're building a Web services middle tier that is going to allow us to reuse a number of network management tools in different ways. One is to link to the tools inside a portal for our customer service agents to make it easier for our agents to troubleshoot cable problems with customers. We have also exposed the tools to handhelds that our techs are going to have out in the field. And ultimately, we'll expose those tools to our customers so they can check status anytime as well.
By following this SOA model, we're building a middle tier for network management that will then be reused for multiple purposes across the company. In addition, we are moving towards a complete Web services model for all of order management — not just provisioning.
So, piece by piece we're creating macro coarse-grained services that are implemented as a composite application made up of underlying services. Those services will be incorporated into other composite applications as part of our enterprise architecture.
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