In this second part of a two-part post on SOA governance, experts discuss some solutions to addressing SOA governance. Part I was a discussion of the most vexing challenges.
Pat Walsh says one way to effectively deliver SOA governance is to focus efforts on the individuals or lines of businesses that can directly benefit from the services. “One thing that we found is helpful is really keying on the identities of the people that are looking to get something out of the governance systems that are built for SOA,” he explains. “The key identities we look at obviously include the developers, but also the operations people, the business people that are looking for the reporting, and maybe metering and monitoring so they can see how the overall SOA is actually providing a return on their investment. Focusing in on some of the roles is also an important way to get beyond some of the hype of governance and the confusion that can cause.”
Theo Beack urges extending incentives to developers and managers to adopt SOA-based services. “With an ROI model, you can quantify how much money you saved the organization or how you helped increase the productivity or increase revenue -- and that can affect your bonus. And where people have started tying bonus incentives to governance, they see much higher adoption and compliance. So I think that's a very positive way to do it.”
Automate where possible, Theo adds. “The problem may be that governance processes and procedures may be disruptive to the organization. You can try to limit the disruption by automating where possible. For example, automate the steps required to promote specific assets or service from, say, development to QA to production. By doing that, it makes it easier for people to actually comply, because you don't increase the amount of manual steps tied to the productivity and any task they have to perform.”
Accenture’s David Nichols urges organizations to develop governance strategies early in their SOA processes. “We find some clients that are very early in their adoption and deployment of SOA to really zero in on a more centralized organizational governance approach,” he says. “What this allows them to do is standardize development of services, truly get their methodology in place for how they’re going to build, test and deploy their services and establish a foundation that allows them to reuse the services they create. Reuse is not a byproduct of SOA – it’s truly managed, and the effectiveness of reuse is only going to be done through your governance structure.”
Check out the full podcast interviews (MP3 downloads) with the experts here:
David Nichols, Accenture
Theo Beack, BEA
Pat Walsh, IONA
Dave Chappell, Oracle
Hub Vandervoort, Progress
These podcasts were part of this fall's SOA Executive Forum, produced by InfoWorld. ebizQ, in cooperation with InfoWorld, has published a special supplement on SOA: Building a Foundation for Continuous Change. The report features interviews with the industry’s top practitioners to reveal the best practices, customer case studies and industry surveys that you can use to transform you tactical SOA systems into the right strategic mix of governance, and integration with complementary technologies like BPM that will increase the depths and directions of your business agility.
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