SOA Governance in a Mashed-Up World (Part II of II)
05/08/2008
By Kelly Emo, Director of SOA Software Product Marketing, Hewlett-Packard
Editor's note: Read Part I of this article by clicking here. What does implicit governance look like?
Implicit governance requires several key processes to enable IT to have the
visibility, trust and control they need over its dynamic services environment
to enable composite and situational applications made up of services that deliver
business flexibility with operational integrity. It starts by embracing governance
across the service lifecycle while accommodating for the fact that certain services
will become mash-able and consumption relationships less predictable and more
dynamic.
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With this in mind, here are some key considerations and steps:
1. In the planning process, the business owners and enterprise architects
collaborate to determine the key business services that will support the business
strategy. Assuming that the business is planning to foster innovation through
new in-house business processes and end-user applications but also by allowing
consumers both inside and outside the organization to participate in the business
collaboratively, the business owners will need to work with the enterprise architecture
team to identify which services will need to be candidates for "mash-ups."
This attribute then becomes a key piece of metadata in a SOA governance infrastructure
that supports service discovery and consumption.
By identifying a service as mash-able, this will alert the enterprise architecture
team that a unique contract type that needs to be associated with that service.
This will indicate that a certain percentage of consumers will be unpredictable
and possibly from outside corporate boundaries and will expect the WSYWIG contract
type. Thus, the service will need to have consumer-provider relationships of
both types, internal more structured contracts for back-office or planned consumption
relationships and light-weight WSYWIG contracts for mash-up consumption.
2. As the frequency and instantiation of services that can be mashed-up
proliferates, it is also important to equip the enterprise architecture
team to auto-discover services that have the potential to be mash-able.