SOA in Action Blog

Successful SOA projects seems to have one thing in common -- they were developed on an incremental basis. The same principal extends to SOA governance itself, says Larry Fulton, senior analyst at Forrester Research. "You can really go too far too fast and end up with processes that are very overweight considering what you’re really doing with them. An incremental approach is probably a good way to go. The big pitfall to avoid is building out a lot more governance than you need given where you are in your SOA journey."

My ebizQ colleague Peter Schooff just wrapped up a podcast with Larry, who will be a keynoter at ebizQ's upcoming virtual conference on SOA governance.

Larry emphasized launching SOA and SOA governance with a tight focus -- concentrate on "those things that are most relevant to a starting-out position and then evolve your way into some of the other things." It's important to get buy-in to SOA efforts, and have a clean, well-streamlined process for managing the creation, maintenance, and retiring of services.

And then the second best practice that I think is very important is that you really do need when you put any kind of process together that’s going to be business process within IT, you want to make sure that process is well understood.

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