SOA Governance: Applying Governance to Ensure the Long-term Benefits of SOA

Abstract

Report Synopsis

The number of SOA projects has accelerated to the point where SOA should be considered to be in early mainstream deployment rather than a ' bleeding edge' approach to delivering IT systems. However, alongside the success stories there is also a significant set of organisations for which SOA doesn' t seem to be delivering the expected benefits. Typical problems reported are that services are not being reused and the business is not seeing the new level of IT agility that was promised. These symptoms, disappointing as they are, should not be taken as an indication that SOA does not deliver; rather they should be taken as a strong indication that the governance of the SOA initiative has not received the attention it deserves.The purpose of SOA governance, as with any other governance implementation, is to keep the initiative on the rails, targeted at delivering the benefits that the business needs. Perhaps the most common error with respect to SOA is to treat this as any other IT initiative - as something that solely concerns IT and that should remain hidden from the business. In fact, implementing SOA without making it a joint business/IT venture is even less likely to deliver business benefits than would implementing a data warehouse without involving information users from the business. Although generally considered to be a subset of IT governance, SOA governance is better thought of as providing a linkage between corporate governance and IT governance, and hence should be jointly owned.

Key Findings

• How SOA governance provides linkage between corporate governance and IT governance.
• Why people and processes are more critical to SOA governance than the supporting technology.
• How to ensure the service architecture is designed for the benefit of the whole organisation, not just the initial project.
• How to monitor the health of the runtime environment in a continuous fashion.
• Why business policies should be enforced dynamically through active runtime components.
• How to address the complexity of SOA change management.
• How leading companies have deployed SOA governance in their own organisations.
• Which vendor solutions can be deployed to support the different phases of SOA governance.