First Look

Two Key Waves for IT

Emo predicts that two major waves are "coming to shore for IT" right now. The first is SOA, with surveys putting adoption rates at 40 to 60 percent of enterprises having SOA in a pilot phase or business deployment. She also cites a few surveys that indicate over 70 percent of CIOs have SOA plans for 2008.

"It definitely hit the mainstream in terms of thinking about it and planning for it," she comments.

The other wave is Web 2.0, which makes for an interesting time for IT. IT departments are dealing with "meaty back office problems" but end users are sometimes too impatient to wait for IT departments and their planning processes, and so they take their needs into their own hands with new approaches like mash-ups and Web collaboration.

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Governance in SOA has been the subject of much discussion -- a trend some analysts say is a sign of the technology's movement to a more mature phase. And Web 2.0 is another interesting trend that opens up SOA possibilities.

Kelly Emo, an SOA product marketing manager with HP Software, has some particular interest in the state of SOA governance -- and she'll be speaking on this issue in a presentation called "Enterprise Mash-Ups for Wall Street: Leveraging SOA Web 2.0" at the Web Services SOA on Wall Street show set for February 11.

"I just see it’s such an exciting and dynamic area right now," she says.

Two Key Waves for IT

Emo predicts that two major waves are "coming to shore for IT" right now. The first is SOA, with surveys putting adoption rates at 40 to 60 percent of enterprises having SOA in a pilot phase or business deployment. She also cites a few surveys that indicate over 70 percent of CIOs have SOA plans for 2008.

"It definitely hit the mainstream in terms of thinking about it and planning for it," she comments.

The other wave is Web 2.0, which makes for an interesting time for IT. IT departments are dealing with "meaty back office problems" but end users are sometimes too impatient to wait for IT departments and their planning processes, and so they take their needs into their own hands with new approaches like mash-ups and Web collaboration.

Hero or Zero

At this point, Emo jokes that IT has the opportunity to become the hero or the zero based on whether it chooses to embrace this capability. If they do not, then they are more likely to run into issues. Emo hopes instead that IT will embrace the new "Wild West of Web 2" but pay attention to governance.

Implicit Governance

Emo thinks there's a desire for back office environments to become service oriented -- enabling the infrastructure to be governed and allowing parts to be exposed in mashable services, and in order to create these applications, IT needs a sense of control.

"Even though they can’t predict how many consumers they’re going to have out there in the Web 2 world, they can know how many they’re able to support and they manage as the load comes in when they need to allocate more resources," she explains.

Emo calls that concept implicit governance. Consumers are not aware of the governance process but are assured of getting the services they expect, while IT is also able to get ahead of the curve and be ready to offer support.

How to Orchestrate Governance

Emo has some examples for how this works in action. Say, for example, a company has back office applications that support the sales department and wants the ability to expose those to the sales department in order to create situational applications.

That company can put in technology to the back end to support security and performance along with testing capabilities that feed into the governance process, then determine the kinds of loads that the systems will support. Then, when exposing services as mashables, they place a contract between the consumers in WYSIWYG style.

"What IT can now do, because they’ve got this governance platform in place, is they can track proactively how many consumption events are taking place and what kind of traffic they’re seeing and they can get ahead of the curve," she says.

Companies could also do things like track traffic to create policies to deprovision customers that aren't using the system in order to free up capability for others.

"Think about if you wanted to allow new channels for your products or services and creative mash-ups to deliver information about your products into whole new markets where they’ll want to place orders," she says. "

I mean, that could just explode worldwide."