IT Organisations Have Largely Grown Up To Become Compartmentalised

Larry Fulton, senior analyst, Forrester Research, shares his views on the criticality of SOA governance strategy for successful SOA implementation with Biztech2.

Why does SOA need governance?

SOA, by its very nature, is about building capability for the long term, not in an isolated project-by-project manner. SOA governance covers a range of disciplines, from managing a catalog of services to SOA platform planning and evolution. Given the number of participants and the potentially large number of services and service dependencies, effective processes for making decisions and tracking these artifacts, governance is essential.

What are some of the key elements that constitute an effective SOA governance strategy?

There are a couple of elements. First is the service lifecycle management process, used to keep track of all the services, where they are used, and their dependencies. This process is also used to notify stakeholders of any new services or changes to existing services.

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Another key process is SOA platform planning, a process used to determine what changes need to be made to an organization’s software infrastructure to meet the near-term and long-term needs of its SOA program.

How does one quantify the IT investments?

The first investment is in committing to proven governance processes and in committing to keeping these processes as streamlined as possible. Once an organization understands what it is trying to do, it will likely choose to automate those processes once they grow beyond a point where manual processes are sufficient.

How critical is managing individual service lifecycles in an SOA governance framework?

It is fundamentally critical. If you don’t have one up-to-date catalog of available services, how do you avoid unnecessary duplication of effort? How do you accurately assess the impact of a proposed change?

Remember that a successful SOA strategy will create many dependencies as services are used in multiple contexts. If something does go wrong, you will want to have the information at your fingertips to assess the impact and validate any proposed solutions.

What are some of the biggest challenges in establishing efficient SOA governance?

Usually the biggest problems are organizational. IT organizations have largely grown up to become very compartmentalized. Application teams avoid entanglements with corporate processes or dependencies on other groups almost as a matter of survival. An SOA culture is fundamentally more cooperative, and this is not a core skill of most IT shops. To make this work, development teams need to be willing to relinquish some control, process owners need to make streamlining and customer service a priority, and management has to evolve the organization continuously to adapt to changing support realities as service developers and consumers morph into a network of internal customers and providers.