<<The concern about SOA governance has ratcheted up as enterprises are
aggressively looking for ways to get more value out of their existing
services and resources (which is a perennial promise of IT solutions).
In perusing the increasing commentary on the topic, it seems to me that
SOA governance - what it is, its goals, its success requirements, its
solution requirements, etc - is highly dependent on the perspective of
the people involved. Whenever a bunch of different perspectives together
under one banner name, you either get a cacophony or the ability to pull
off movie-worthy plans (ala The Italian Job or Ocean's Eleven). Which is
it going to be for SOA governance?
Let's take a look at some of these perspectives. Enterprise strategists,
for example, think about SOA governance in corporate execution terms.
They have spent time translating strategic business goals such as
lowering time-to-market costs, reducing compliance risks or improving
service quality to cost ratios into enterprise SOA requirements.
However, for that enterprise architecture to succeed, strategists must
also nurture its adoption by the entire enterprise. For them, governance
involves tracking the progress of the enterprise as it builds SOA
capabilities over time and as it matures its use of those capabilities
to provide competitive advantage.
Additionally, they are concerned with structuring policies and processes
that clarify SOA-related decision making processes and responsibilities,
such as: what decisions must be made and when should they be made; what
information is needed to make those decisions and where does it come
from, who should make those decisions and how do they coordinate with
other stakeholders, how decisions implemented, automated, reviewed and
revised as business conditions change. From this perspective, SOA
governance solutions often involve corporate policy and procedure
automation, performance indicator tracking, and managing enterprise
roadmaps.
Most IT managers have a difference perspective. They tend to think about
SOA governance in application lifecycle terms -- design/architecture,
develop/assemble, testing/deployment, runtime operations/policy
enforcement. The main governance issues tend to be around coordinating
these lifecycle activities between the different IT groups, each with
their own processes and highly specific solutions. In spite of internal
efforts to consolidate IT suppliers, it will be extremely difficult to
uproot and replace existing IT solutions that are effective and
delivering value for a particular group. From this perspective SOA
governance solutions should involve managing and/or federating service
meta-data, technical policies and requirements across the preferred
tools/solutions each of these groups needs.
Business unit managers often talk about SOA governance in financial and
resource management terms. Those that are producing services are
wondering: "How do I benefit if my service becomes extremely popular?
I'll have to dedicate more infrastructure and people to supporting the
performance and coordinating upgrades with all the consumers. I'm not
budgeted to support other BUs." On the flipside, those that are
consuming these services are thinking: "I'm creating new value for my
BU from services that we already have, so why should I have to share the
top-line benefits?" Basically, SOA can up-end decades-old thinking about
departmental boundaries and budget allocation, since services developed
and maintained by one department can be reused by others. From their
perspective, SOA governance solutions should focus on coordinating
ownership, performance responsibilities, funding and internal
charge-backs for shared resources.
As you can see, each perspective on governance is different, but related
to each other, and potentially require significant effort to achieve
(and I haven't even touched issues such as compliance, security, data
confidentiality, technology standards, etc.). Getting every SOA
governance perspective on the same page is no small feat for large
enterprises. Yet the payoff in terms of enterprise cost effectiveness
and agility can be enormous when governance mechanisms are implemented
in a coordinated way. So the question is, how can enterprises keep all
of these efforts on track? Particularly at a time when employees are
often expending as much effort trying to keep their jobs as they are
doing their jobs.
Part of it depends on those tasked with designing and implementing their
aspects of SOA governance. They must recognize their solutions, policies
and procedures must be designed to slip into the daily tasks of people
involved. Think email integration with CRM solutions as an example -- in
my experience, no one took the extra time to log all of their contact
emails SAP, ACT! or even Salesforce.com -- until there was Outlook
integration which automated the logging process. The same thinking
should apply to SOA governance. The most successful groups will add
governance mechanisms without a lot of additional employee effort.
Part of it depends on each group recognizing the common bonds between
these different perspectives. For example, there needs to be a common
way of describing and discovering available shared services so that they
can be tracked by those responsible for their lifecycle management,
those concerned with business unit resource management, and those
responsible for tracking corporate SOA capabilities and usage. This
means keeping the meta-data about shared service function, composition,
ownership, dependencies, etc. as simple and specific as possible to
avoid confusion as different groups exploit that data in different ways.
Part of it is executive-level recognition that all these aspects of SOA
governance are not luxury items. Enterprise executives must buy-into
and clearly communicate why and how they expect effective governance to
be a key aspect of navigating treacherous economic waters. With
demonstrable executive support, SOA governance -- in all its forms --
becomes a competitive advantage.>>
You can read this at:
http://www.soainstitute.org/articles/article/article/is-soa-governance-a-confused-mess-or-competitive-weapon.html
Gervas
