Governance or no governance, someone is always making a decision on the direction of SOA projects -- why not do it right?
This is a case where the well-worn phrase, "you can't be just a little bit pregnant" applies to service oriented architecture as well. In a recent analyst podcast, Todd Biske, enterprise architect extraordinaire and author of the recently published work on SOA Governance took issue with the notion that perhaps SOA governance 'Lite' can work in many situations.
"I'm not a believer in the term "lite" governance," Todd said. "I'm of the opinion that you have governance, whether you admit it or not. An alternative view of governance is that it is a decision-rights structure.... Someone is always making decision on projects. ...no matter what, you always have governance on projects."
Todd encourages SOA governance to be as enterprise-focused -- or as centralized -- as possible. "The risk you have in becoming too federated, and getting too many decisions made locally, is that you lose sight of the bigger picture," he says.
While SOA has taken its share of knocks from critics over the past year or so, Todd sees it as the best route to IT and corporate productivity:
"The reason companies should be adopting SOA is that something has to change. There is something about the way IT is working with the rest of the business that isn't operating as efficiently and as productively as it could. And, if there is a change that has to go on, how do you manage that change and how do you make sure it happens? It's not just buying a tool, or applying some new technology. There has to be a more systematic process for how we manage that change, and to me that's all about governance."
Podcast leader Dana Gardner asked Todd if there were any "telltale signs" that an organization is missing the governance boat when it comes to efforts to effectively deploy SOA methodologies. Todd observed that many organizations may not have conflicting priorities when it comes to SOA-based projects. "Telltale signs are when you are having meeting after meeting with people disagreeing and saying, 'Well, my management told me this is my priority,' and somebody else is saying, 'My management is telling me this priority,'" Todd observed.
SOA governance should provide a structure to address competing priorities, and get the right peple involved, he explained.
A transcript of the discussion is available from the BriefingsDirect site.
Anne Thomas Manes sometimes calls governance the pre-flight checklist before you fly an airplane. And in my book SOA Adoption for dummies, I talk about Mission Control and rockets.
It is kind of hard to imagine a "short version" of the airplane pre-flight checklist.
My 2 cents,
Miko
Miko:
So true, you definitely don't want a pre-flight checklist "lite" if you are an airplane passenger or an astronaut. Nor would you want brain surgery "lite!"