It was a year ago that ebizQ's Beth Gold-Bernstein and contributor Brenda Michelsen teamed up to deliver what I thought was one of the most definitive studies on SOA to date. (My links to the study and accompanying Webcast can be found here and here.)
ebizQ's survey of 313 companies found that only 17% of enterprises were happy with their governance efforts. Yet, those with runtime governance automation in place where much more likely to be satisfied with their governance is achieving. Satisfaction and results with governance were closely tied to the automation of governance.
Now, a new survey out of the SOA Forum finds that only 12% of companies are happy with where their SOA governance is going. Not only are nine out of ten companies are not satisfied with their SOA governance, but most still rely on manual checks and procedures to make sure proposed services meet their standards. In addition, most feel there are undocumented services slipping through into production mode.
In the survey of 500+ corporations and government agencies, 85% said that they rely on manual reviews to achieve governance in the design-time phase of services, and 45% rely on manual policy enforcement checks before adding services to their registries. The SOA Forum survey also reveals that 56% of the respondents admit that at least half of the code or artifacts developed under their roofs are not reviewed for compliance before moving into production.
This percentage changes, of course, when automated governance approaches are put into place. Among those companies leveraging automated policy enforcement solutions, 88% say more than half of their services are vetted, and 50% say all potential services are vetted.
I think that a lot of companies are choosing to not use governance tools becuase to the total cost of ownership. JaxView is a product that offers SOA and web services runtime governance and a very cost effective price point allowing for a true ROI.
From my experience SOA initiatives are divided into 3 types
1. starting with implementing SOA in the form of WS for example without any architectural view, this leads to hundred of point to point services that eventually overlap functionally and create an overhead for the infrastructure, this organizations can not appreciate the real value of SOA, and think that it was a bad idea in the first place.
2. Are the ones that have created some manual governance process , with no collaboration between the run time and design time governance processes, in the organization, their ability to move the entire company to SOA is limited, and therefore stack in SOA islands.
3. The ones that think before they start, take the holistic approach and define such things as the business model and the services that will be created, their level of quality and SLA prior to exposing them, this approach will lead them to success .
SOA is first of all an architecture we need to define the blueprints and the tools to achieve it .
There are many tools that can help in gaining this kind of governance ( Logidex, Flashline , systinet est.) and this seems that adopting this approach is something this i that have to be considered in the early stages for organization that wants to gain the benefits of SOA.