The Insider's Guide to Business and IT Agility
The Insider's Guide to Business and IT Agility
By Beth Gold-Bernstein , 07/02/2009
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Everyone recommends starting small and growing as you gain knowledge and experience. Therefore, it is beneficial if your governance tools, including registries/repositories and runtime monitoring and enforcement of policies, can grow with you. Some vendors take the enterprise level approach to their tools. Some give you the option to start small and grow the infrastructure over time with your efforts. However, even if you are starting small, be sure to include all phases of the life cycle.
As most organizations have multiple registries and repositories -- for security, for testing, for asset management, for different areas of the organization. The ability to integrate and federate repositories is also important to avoid islands of governance. Most of the vendors I spoke support registry federation.
While many SOA implementations begin from the bottom up, and start with minimal governance, ultimately business success requires the formalization of roles, responsibilities, and expectations of providers and consumers. It is difficult to claim success if the business and IT organizations do not agree what success is. It is also difficult to achieve success unless everyone plays their role. Who can define policies? Who can change them? Who ensures they are enforced? Organizations are implementing SOA solutions because business processes and practices move from command and control structures to more distributed, cooperative federated processes. While the systems can be designed to automate the processes, the organizational structures must also be defined to govern them appropriately.
Once again, governance should not be a burden. It should be implemented to ensure success. How much governance is enough depends on what you are trying to achieve. However, achieving success at all is unlikely without appropriate governance.
