Two years ago, BT Exact — BT Group's technology and IT operations division — announced a far-reaching project to develop a single design-and-delivery methodology for all future IT projects across the group.
The company's Systems Engineering Programme (SEP) is ultimately intended to provide a single environment for managing software development, using technologies and concepts that have become a familiar part of the lexicon of the service-oriented architecture (SOA). For instance, BT is standardising on Unified Modeling Language (UML) for its design notation. The company worked with Borland — which is also supplying the tools underpinning the SEP effort — to put together a BT-specific guide translating the company's usual requirements specifications into UML.
The hope is that the clarity afforded by UML will make it easier for different teams to work together, as well as making outsourcing and offshoring more effective. BT had failed in its previous attempts to standardise on a single design notation because of lack of agreement over language in the industry.
At the same time, BT is undergoing a massive shift in its engineering culture, looking to use more agile methods, cut spending on development and ultimately to merge resources into a single IT department of about 8,000 people.
Like many large companies, BT's design and development practices have grown up without any particular overall plan, leading to high development costs and inflexibility. Its internal and external software architects, engineers, analysts and systems integrators all use a range of tools to manage different stages of development, something BT is looking to simplify by standardising on common tools and processes.
The company is putting into place a single repository for all its designs — based on Borland's StarTeam and incorporating a UML-based agile modelling development platform — which should promote clarity and the re-use of standard design components.
Simon Ward, a lead architect at BT Exact currently working with the Integration and Data Design team, is speaking on Wednesday at IDC's SOA conference in London. Builder UK spoke with him about the unique challenges facing a company of BT's size and complexity in implementing a SOA.
You can read the full interview with Simon Ward on Builder UK, ZDNet UK's site for developers.
