<<Too many companies still assume if they deploy an enterprise service bus -- or reasonable variation of an ESB -- that the hard part of SOA is taken care of. This is a misconception that's leading many SOA efforts astray, cautions Anne Thomas Manes, analyst with The Burton Group.
Many SOA efforts will be failing over the next few years, Manes predicted. These failures won't be because of a lack of technology, but because of a lack of organizational wherewithal, she said. Manes, leading a new ebizQ Webinar entitled "Discover Your Inner SOA," joined AmberPoint's Ed Horst in a discussion of what makes governance so important to SOA efforts. (Link to Webinar here.) "SOA is really, really challenging, and it's all about culture, not really about technology. It's going to deliver enormous benefits in terms of flexibility and agility if you can do it the right way. If you don't deliver, you're stuck with the status quo, and I don't of any company that's really happy with that right now." If anything, implementing ESBs is the most straightforward part of the architecture -- in fact, most organizations may already have more than one functioning ESB that are called something else, such as integration brokers. The hard part is being able to leverage the value of the service across the enterprise, Manes said. Services need to be designed and tested properly. They need to be kept compliant. They need to be designed for reuse across the enterprise. There needs to be a way to determine what services are actually needed by other groups within the enterprise. Unlike previous IT initiatives, SOA has a lot of compounding factors, Manes points out. "Number one, it's unfamiliar territory. Designing services for SOA is different from the way people have been building things in the past. In the past, people built applications to solve a business problem. But they weren't really thinking about what capability is going to be used by another line of business. How do you design a service so that it can actually be reused?" How does an organization go about assuring that the right services reach the right consumers across the enterprise? Governance is the key. "Without that governance, your SOA is going to spiral into chaos," she said. "Those systems that you're building are going to end up as brittle as inflexible as ever before. That would be a shame, because you're spending a lot of money of this stuff, and you're going to wind up with the same old, same old." Culture and politics tend to derail many SOA projects, Manes said. "In order to be successful with SOA, you have to treat cultural and political issues associated with SOA. To make that happen you have to put together a decent governance program that addresses the entire service life cycle." In addition, she adds, "governance should be as helpful and as automatic as possible. If it is a hurdle, if people have to do stuff they've never had to do before, it typically produces a bunch of resentment -- and people will figure out ways to avoid it." The more you can automate your governance processes, the better, Manes said. This includes automating the processes and enforcement mechanisms within both development and runtime phases of the service life cycle.>> You can read Joe's blog at: http://www.soainaction.com/blog/2007/02/governance_1.php Gervas
