Business Transformation in Action

Joe McKendrick

Five Biggest SOA Governance Mistakes and How to Correct Them

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Dave Rosenberg, CEO of MuleSource, works with a lot of organizations that are starting their SOA journeys, and noticed that many make the same mistake: they spend all their time worry about the technical details of their implementations, but don't pay enough attention to governance.

In a new post here at ebizQ, Dave outlined what he sees as the five greatest mistakes in SOA governance:

1-Decentralizing common artifacts: "When common artifacts such as WSDLs, schemas or configs are scattered in various locations, organizations waste time searching for interfaces and schemas," Dave says. "This is because they lack a central authority for the published service interface, which discourages discovery and reuse across an enterprise."

2-Reinventing the wheel: Perhaps the biggest problem SOA was meant to correct. "Services and applications are often written again and again to perform the same function," Dave says. "As a result, many different versions of the same artifact are built and integrated, increasing development times and creating a huge maintenance cost burden." The solution is a centralized repository or registry available to the enterprise.

3-Hoping for best practices: "Developers may not inherently know best practices, and even if they do, they may not follow them every time," Dave says. Best practices can and should be enforced as enterprise-wide policies, anywhere from the build to the registry to people and processes.

4-Forgetting about service consumers: It is important to continuously be aware of how a service is being used by the final consumer at the end of the process, Dave says. He recommends adopting tools that track dependency management.

5-Inconsistent application deployment strategy: "Many application deployment strategies are ad-hoc, not well documented, and only understood by one person," Dave says. A registry and repository can help automate developer actions, and thus ensure consistency.

How far along are most organizations with their SOA governance? ebizQ recently conducted a survey on SOA governance trends, and I will be joining Christian Hastedt Marckwardt, solution marketing director with SAP, on Tuesday, April 29, at Noon Eastern Time in a special Webinar to discuss the survey results and implications. Be sure to join us for a compelling hour, as well as receive a complimentary copy of the complete survey results!

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In this blog (formerly known as "SOA in Action"), Joe McKendrick examines how BPM and related business and IT approaches can promote business transformation.

Joe McKendrick

Joe McKendrick is an author and independent analyst who tracks the impact of information technology on management and markets. View more

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