Often, committees are the best way to slow down and obfuscate things. But when it comes to SOA, you may want a committee to interject itself between service creators and your registry. A committee with teeth may be the best way to keep "junk" services out of an enterprise service registry.
James Kobielus just published a very thorough update in Network World on the state of SOA governance, and I was pleased to see The Hartford's Ben Moreland prominently featured. I have had the opportunity to speak with Ben on his SOA work, and The Hartford is clearly one of the SOA leaders within the insurance industry, if not across the board.
The Hartford has a very strong governance effort, led by an SOA steering committee consisting of application architects. In their bimonthly meetings, committee members assess proposed new services "based on such criteria as supportability, reusability and adherence to the company’s SOA reference architecture." The Hartford also employs a workflow manual to drive the process, Kobielus reports.
Moreland is also aware of the issues around services pushed into the registry without IT support to back the service up and maintain it, and therefore requires that IT sign off on all proposed services.
“We don’t want a junk drawer of unsupported services in our SOA registry,” Moreland is quoted as saying.
This process keeps business and IT groups from proliferating "junk" services to the group’s master Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) registry, the article noted. Moreland hopes to automate much of the approval process through workflow tools that integrate with its UDDI registry.
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