I’ve been busy over the past month working on the plan phase for a project.  While it’s been pretty busy, it’s also been interesting.  The project I’m working on is intended to be an enterprise-wide service (including both web services and reusable UIs) for all applications that need to access data in this particular area of the business (in keeping with my policy of not identifying my employer, I have to be careful not to give too many specifics).  What’s interesting is that working on this project has given me some exposure to things at an enterprise level that I haven’t been able to see before. 

Previously, we’ve had problems where different divisions or business units would create their own applications that pretty much did the same thing.  Of course, each unit would claim some unique requirement, or that there was no other service available.  In addition to this project, my current job responsibilities have me reviewing other projects that are coming forward at the enterprise level in my particular area.  In particular, I found it interesting that one of the other projects that came through this week was one that consolidates an application that I worked on three years ago with those from two other business areas to finally create one unified service that provides this particular function.  In the past, whenever I heard of some other business unit or division creating a similar service I always made sure to inform them of the one I worked on, but up until now it seems like no one was willing to listen.  I’m not sure why it took so long to get to this point, but we now finally have a single board for this area of the business that reviews projects across business units and forces them to work together.  It’s probably kind of annoying to some who have the “not invented here” syndrome, but I’m sure it will eventually save money, as it’s certainly more efficient to pay (for example) $1.5M for one service than $1M each for three services that do the same thing.  It just takes more planning up front to make sure all requirements are covered.