The concept of integrating SOA and general IT/ICT Governance is not one which I
had seen raised before, so I was interested that the two answers to this poll
so far indicated partial integration. Now, here is an interesting note on SOA
Governance and ITIL from Todd (whose birthday is today - many happy returns,
young man!):
<<Tony Baer joined the SOA Consortium on one of its working group conference
calls this week to discuss his research on connections between ITIL and SOA.
Both he and Beth Gold-Bernstein have blogged about the call, Beth focusing on
the broader topic of SOA and ITIL, and Tony talking about the topic of service
ownership, as these topics were the meat of the conversation between Beth,
Tony, and myself.
I've spent the past few years thinking about all things SOA, and recently, I
completed the ITIL v3 Foundations certification and have been doing a lot of
work in the ITIL/ITSM space. When you move away from the technology-side of the
discussion and actually talk about the people and process side of the
discussion, you'll find that there are significant similarities between
ITIL/ITSM adoption and SOA adoption. Tony had a diagram in his presentation
that illustrated this that Beth reproduced on her blog. Having looked at this
from both the SOA world of the application developer and the ITIL/ITSM world of
IT operations, there's a lot that we can learn from ITIL in our SOA adoption
efforts. Foremost, ITIL defines a role of Service Manager. Anyone who's
listened to my panel discussions and heard my answer to the question, "What's
the one piece of advice you have for companies adopting SOA?" you'll know that
I always answer, "Make sure all your services have owners." I've decided I like
the term "Service Manager" better than "Service Owner" at this point, but if
you refer to past posts of mine, you can think of these two terms synonymously.
So what does a service manager do? Let's handle the easy one. Clearly, service
management begins with the initial release of the service. The service manager
is accountable for defining this release and putting the project in motion to
get it out the door. This involves working with the initial service consumer(s)
to go over requirements, get the interface defined, build, test, deploy, etc.
Clearly, there's probably a project manager, developers, etc. helping in the
effort, but in a RACI model, it's the service manager who has accountability.
The work doesn't end there, however. Once the service is in production, the
service manager must be receiving reports on the service utilization,
availability, etc. and always making sure it meets the needs of the
consumer(s). In other words, they must ensure that "service" is being provided.
They must also be defining the next release of the service. How does this
happen? Well, part of it comes from analysis of current usage, part of it comes
from external events, such as a merger, acquisition, or new regulations, and
part of it comes from seeking out new customers. Some consumers may come along
on their own with new requests. Reading between the lines, however, it is very
unlikely that a service manager manages only one service. It is more likely
that they manage multiple services within a common domain. Even if it is one
service, it's likely that the service has multiple operations. The service
manager is the one responsible for the portfolio of services and their
operations, and trying to find the right balance between meeting consumer needs
and keeping a maintainable code base. If there's redundancy, the service
manager is the one accountable for managing it and getting rid of it where it
makes sense. This doesn't negate the need for enterprise service portfolio
management, because sometimes the redundancy may be spread across multiple
service managers.
So what's the list? Here's a start. Add other responsibilities via comments.
* Release Management (a.k.a. Service Lifecycle Management)
* Production Monitoring
* Customer (Consumer) Management
* Service Management
* Marketing
* Domain Research: Trends associated with the service domain
* Domain-Specific Service Portfolio Management
Think hard about this, as it's a big shift from many IT organizations today.
How many organizations have their roles strictly structured around project
lifecycle activities, rather than service lifecycle activities? How many
organizations perform these activities even at an application level? It's a
definition change to the culture of many organizations.>>
Gervas
--- In [email protected], "Gervas Douglas"
<gervas.doug...@...> wrote:
>
> SOA Social has a new poll at
> http://www.soasocial.com/apps/polls/view.action?id=14 on SOA Governance and
> general IT Governance.
>
> Gervas
>
