For a number of years, most discussions involving SOA governance revolved around registries and repositories and whether to implement them in design time or runtime environments, and whether UDDI was the optimum spec for all this.
Now, there's an increasing awareness it doesn't matter how well governance tools and technologies work -- they may even be irrelevant if the supporting organization isn't tuned into SOA governance.
In a recent podcast with Dave Linthicum, Mike Stamback, director of product marketing at Oracle (and formerly part of BEA), talked about this shift in thinking about SOA governance. "All the vendors that actually provide offerings in this space have evolved their thinking to where the technology is just one aspect of the governance solution, and that's its really a cultural shift," he said. "It's really about having the right culture and defining the right processes within your organization to be able to manage SOA correctly and the technology is there to automate that process as much as possible."
This is an important statement, because one of the challenges I've been having in my own work and writings with SOA governance has been separating out the organizational aspects from the technical aspects. Earlier in my career, after doing some graduate work in public administration and also managing projects as editor and researcher (and later director) for the Administrative Management Society, I did a lot of exploration of issues around corporate governance, and the impact of such leadership on organizational strategy, vision, and day-to-day operations -- concluding that effective organizational governance makes all the difference between success and failure, between being a hidebound and overly risk-averse organization to one that is better able to adapt and innovate.
We have to connect the dots. These principles apply to SOA as well -- especially since SOA is an enterprise-wide transformational initiative. The discussion on governance needs to get elevated to the level of organizational vision and strategy, or SOA will forever remain an IT backwater, along with job control languages and storage.
Stamback hits the nail on the head. As he put it: "The biggest risk is believing that the products or the technology that you're utilizing for a governance is going to solve your governance problem. I've talked to a number of customers who have told me that they bought a service registry, for example, nine months ago and they now only have nine services in the registry. And so they tend to think that their governance program is failing. And its not that they're utilizing the wrong technology, it's that they didn't think about the other aspects around governance, which are the people and process."
Listen to the podcast here, or read the transcript here.
___________________________________________________________________
Leave a comment