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On September 24, 2008, ebizQ panelists are asking some important questions
about governance in a day-long virtual
conference (if you're reading this article before September 24, 2008, register
to attend here;
if you're reading it afterwards, a replay
is available):
- "Is service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance a part of information
technology (IT) governance or should it be separate?"
- "Who in the organization should be responsible for SOA governance?"
- "Is IT Lifecycle Management (ITLM) software suitable for SOA governance
or does it need to be extended?"
IT Investment Research suggests adding: "What is business process management
(BPM) software's role in IT and SOA governance?"
Frank Kenney of Gartner, who will keynote the conference, contends that SOA
governance is "about being able to effectively consume and provide services
to external partners and customers in the case of software as a service (SaaS)
and cloud computing." The services can come from both internal developers
and ISVs such as SAP, Oracle and Microsoft. That sounds like a job for BPM software
to me.
Larry Fulton, Senior Analyst, Forrester, adds that "IT and SOA design-time
governance solutions provide more than just storage and cataloging of service
information; they also automate the process of service life-cycle management
(SLM). Automating the process of service life-cycle management is the job of
technologies like SOA design-time repositories." He has identified specific
technologies available to automate SLM, but BPM could be used as well. This
is important because the combination of an explosion in unstructured data and
the coming exponential growth in services -- many of them crossing firewalls
by design as described by Kenney -- means IT could lose control of its mission
even more than it did during the PC boom of the 1980s.
Making the decision about whether and how to deploy BPM in an IT/SOA governance
application depends on how your enterprise uses BPM overall. If an enterprise
tends to use BPM for processes that cross the firewall, using it for management
of internal IT resources does not make as much sense as when an enterprise tends
to use BPM to integrate internal processes or all processes.
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