about. You've got your developers working hard on this latest attempt
at enterprise integration by developing web services that connect your
vital systems into what you hope will become your company's first
generation of SOA (service orientated architecture).
But, suddenly, it hits you: your web services are out of control;
calling on each other to supply vital links between your
mission-critical systems and your customers, partners, suppliers and
vendors and you have no idea what systems are dependant on what web
services to function.
Of course, you don't realize this until a developer somewhere makes a
change to an important web service that is underpinning other web
services that connect to eight, 18, 80 separate applications and, all
of sudden, these applications don't do what they are supposed to be doing.
You halt all your development work and go back to square one to
rethink your approach to this newest attempt at IT/business alignment,
the agile enterprise, a loosely coupled infrastructure, utility
computing, etc., etc. (in this context all of these catch-phrases
refer to the same thingmaking IT more flexible and responsive the
needs of the business).
"The advantage of (web services) is about reuse," said Keith Swenson,
Fijitsu's CTO. "So now I can have multiple applications that all use
the same component. And that's really great until you change that
one component; you could now break three or four applications."
Outlined here is a worst-case scenario, said Swenson, but the
potential for cascading failure across many applications is very real.
The applications probably won't crash but they could stop functioning
properly and, perhaps more troubling, begin returning incorrect data
that goes unnoticed.
To get around this problem, Cingular's Vice President of IT
Architecture & Engineering, Victor Nilson, suggests using a service
catalog and a registry/repository to keep track of all deployed web
services, their interdependencies and the applications that call on each.
If this approach is taken early in the process, then the above
scenario can be avoided. But this takes discipline and solid
governance: something many IT shops are only now, two-years after
Sarbanes-Oxley, starting to get a good handle on.
"When you have something as powerful as web services and the way they
can have dependencies on each other and the rate of which teams can
produce them today, I do think there are many IT shops where CIO's
probably aren't as well organized against that as they need to be,"
said Nilson.
This is where a UDDI Registry/Repository comes into its own, said Ivo
Totev, Software AG's VP Product Marketing for Crossvission. Without
such a tool, trying to understand what your web services are and how
and where they are being consumed, would be very hard if not impossible.
But that only takes care of the technical stuff. There are products on
the market today, such as Software AG's CentraSite web services/SOA
management platform, to help with this issue. What's more important is
reigning in your developers and putting strict controls over version
control and change management, said Zap Think Founder and Senior
Analyst Ron Schmelzer.
"Because, until now, because systems are all artesian craft these
developers have a lot of power," he said. "Now the developer is just
sort of the cog-in-the-wheel. It's just like their implementing a
service the way the business has defined it to be and they really
shouldn't have the same kind of control of that service once it's in
production."
In other words, this may cause you problems if you don't have in place
tight controls over who is changing what, when and whysomething many
IT shops struggle with everyday.
But, the news isn't all bad. SOA and web services are among the most
powerful tools for positive change to come along in a long timeif
managed correctlyand should be embraced by CIOs looking to glean the
most benefit and value from their operations with a minimum of effort
and expense, said Nilson, who likens his experience controlling
Cingular's web services to application portfolio management, but at
the next level down.
"In our view it's the next level of portfolio management," he said.
"Historically, people have done portfolio management at the
application level. We're trying to do that at the service level as
well. If you have that discipline it's very nice because now you can
inventory and manage it. You can stay on top of it and it gives you
a capability of managing it that never has historically existed in IT.">>
You can find this article at:
http://www.cioupdate.com/insights/article.php/3605941
Gervas
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