SOA, by its very nature, encourages a highly decentralized, loosely coupled approach to management. That's why it often is a difficult fit within organizations that attempt to shoe-horn "SOA" approaches into rigid, hidebound corporate cultures.
Progress Software's Hub Vandervoort recently published an ebook, Socially Oriented Architecture, that talks about the role of management and corporate culture in SOA success.
ebizQ colleague Beth Gold-Bernstein recently spoke with Hub about his observations, in which he points out that "the worst failures in SOA that I’ve seen have been those where they try to employ a very federated environment and capitalize on reusing services in other domains and so forth, but then they try to manage it with absolute hierarchy. Because what you find is that the domain members tend to want to secede from the union, so to speak."
The bottom line is trust and commitment have to replace command and control for SOA to be successful in organizations, Hub explains. "In the experience we’ve had in rolling out now over 400 ESBs and very large SOA infrastructures, that attempt to approach multiparty interactions at a very large scale, what we’re realizing is there is as much a need for figuring out how to get the people in those various communities and different organization structures to work together in a harmonized way," he says.
"We use the word 'governance' a lot but your SOA needs a way of interacting socially so that all the people who own their various bits of the SOA can work together."
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