IT Governance continues to be a hot topic being discussed at the board level and
executive strategy sessions. While SOA Governance is a subset of larger IT Governance
imperative, it is every bit as important. As companies are investing heavily in
technologies and personnel to achieve SOA, it is important to understand and dispel
the myths and confusion about SOA Governance to ensure the right path to success.
As service-oriented architecture (SOA) moves from early-adopters to mainstream
corporate initiatives, companies are challenged to quickly achieve their intended
goals of business agility and cost savings from service reuse. As the primary
advocate of SOA within a company, the SOA architect is tasked keeping these
goals in perspective while implementing technology and more importantly, processes
that will drive the changes needed to make SOA impactful to a business across
multiple organizational (and sometimes geographic) boundaries.
The SOA Architect's Governance Challenges:
Ensuring Interoperability
Validating SOA results - having proof of success
Creating incentives for reuse of services
Promoting the availability of services
Socializing the Trust and reuse of existing services
Making services accessible and understandable
Avoiding rogue/redundant services
Development delays
Poor service performance - SLAs
Integration Support for services being implemented
Lack of SOA expertise across organization
Applying the right amount of governance - too much vs too little
Communicating and enforcing custom/corporate policies
Accessibility of SOA assets by multiple teams
Collaboration among multiple teams and disparate projects
Successful SOA architects understand that ROI is not based on a technology
platform, infrastructure or implementation but rather on SOA governance initiatives
that result in quality, trust and control among various participants. They also
understand that SOA is dramatically different from traditional enterprise application
environments with unique challenges and issues posed by the always-on, shared
services traits of SOA and the potential impact of changes to services or applications.
SOA Requires Governance From Day One.
Web Services built for use within a SOA are enterprise assets that will stay
with companies for years to come if the service and composite applications leveraging
services perform as intended. As small, pilot projects are used to validate
the need an effectiveness of SOA in an organization, it is critical to apply
governance processes in your pilot and every other early stage project.
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