ideas on shared services

[Ken Laskey <klaskey@mitre.org>]

The attached is largely a repurposing of something I needed to write elsewhere.  It begins to capture ideas that can use some formal capture and wider dissemination.  I’ve bounced some of this off Michael Poulin and a piece of that exchange is captured at the end of the attachment.

Major open items would be thoughts and recommendations on:

- top-down vs. bottoms-up identification of services: to what extent do we have top-down planning and approval to create services?  To what extent do we allow (encourage?) services to organically appear.  Is there a balance between top-down and bottoms-up?  Personal opinion is top-down is usually not smart enough to work unless it is appropriately constrained in scope (and authority) and informed by bottoms-up.  Also, a challenge I’ve seen is a top-down process having to deal with a service that is a bottoms-up success.

- warranted/unwarranted duplication: when is two similar services duplication vs. two different ways to do something?  When is “duplication” needed for innovation?  When is duplication needed for risk mitigation?

- scalable governance: the previous items touch on governance.  Large projects have governance as part of their “overhead" but service governance needs to be lighter weight because it likely needs to be done for more instances and needs to be done much more quickly with fewer resources if it is to be scalable.

- other topics?

We can discuss via email over the next week and then take up as one of the topics for next week’s call.

Ken

Attachment: shared services.docx
Description: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document

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Dr. Kenneth Laskey
MITRE Corporation, M/S F510          phone: 703-983-7934
7515 Colshire Drive                           fax: 703-983-1379
McLean VA 22102-7508