One of the interesting findings to come out of our recent survey on Enterprise SOA is the mixed state of governance that still exists out there. While a third do have a board or committee to oversee governance, another 16% rely on a "center of excellence" to manage the process and gain business buy-in.
What advantage does governance provide to SOA, besides acting as a central clearinghouse for vetting services? For one, governance boards or centers of excellence assure that projects are put into motion based on their merit to the organization, versus individual political agendas. This helps keep SOA decisions above the political fray.
As reported in Application Development Trends, Ian Koenig, senior vice president and chief architect at Thomson Financial, recently spoke on the importance of SOA governance. Koenig provided these key lessons learned about SOA governance:
Lesson Learned: Choose Policies That Matter, or Risk 'Death by Governance': "Having too many policies is just as bad as having none at all," Koenig said. He said his team looked at 5,000 really good ideas and then distilled them down to 170 policies that really mattered.
Lesson Learned: People Don't Communicate: Often, people don;t even see eye to eye on what problems they're trying to solve. "When two or more smart people disagree on a solution, it's almost always true that they don't agree on the problem they are trying to solve," Koenig said. His team employed the UML 2.0 specification to diagram how data should flow.
Make Governance Easy and Do It Early: Here's how people react to complexity, Koenig said: "Sixty percent will do the easy thing, regardless of whether it's right; 40 percent will do the right thing, regardless of whether it's the easy thing to do." The key is to make governance as simple as automatic as possible -- and automation is the best route.
Lesson Learned: Reusability Is Not Cheap: Koenig said reuse is expensive: "Our rough calculation is it's about 2.5 times more expensive to make something reusable as not." Therefore, it's going to take some customer education to sell the idea of putting more funds in up front for an integration project.
Identify an Owner for Each Service: "It's important to identify who defines the value proposition for the service," Koenig said. You need to know "who gets called at 3:00 in the morning if it's not meeting its SLAs."
Fair enough.
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