Strictly enforced governance is critical to the successful implementation of any service-oriented architecture (SOA) because it often requires a change in an organisation`s business culture.
This was the consensus among the local and international speakers at the opening session yesterday of ITWeb`s two-day SOA and Web Services 2006 conference taking place at Gallagher Estate in Midrand.
"Without adequate governance of services, SOA implementations will fail miserably and the expected return on investment will not be achieved," predicted Willie Appel, VP and programme director of Gartner Africa.
Steve Pope, North European director for Aberpoint, agreed that governance was important because SOA tended to centralise risk. He said SOA depended on the ability to govern the use of services through binding policies to services and enforcing them automatically.
US-based IT architect David Bressler, of Progress Software, said governance in turn depended on business process visibility to understand the true nature and origin of business problems.
Deep understanding
A deep understanding of the business in the process of defining services, the close involvement and support of business, and the creation and maintenance of a services registry were other elements identified as vital to the success of SOA.
Speakers also agreed on the biggest challenges to implementing SOA, as well as the potential benefits it could deliver.
Appel emphasised the lack of skills and expertise internationally in implementing this design philosophy was one of the biggest challenges to SOA. This was confirmed in the implementation of SOA at Metropolitan Life, according to Debbie Claassen, an IT architect in the organisation`s retail insurance division.
However, Appel said the fundamental SOA benefits of architectural partitioning, incremental deployment, and service re-use were compelling reasons for its implementation.
In addition, speakers highlighted that SOA enabled organisations to respond rapidly to changing business requirements and provided various cost saving and revenue generation opportunities across heterogeneous IT environments.
Competitive advantage
Claassen said the SOA implementation at Metropolitan Life had effectively reduced IT response to new business requirements from years to weeks. Bressler cited a US pharmaceutical company as an example of how a company could gain a competitive advantage worth millions of dollars by using SOA to enable faster product development.
Despite the benefits of SOA, Appel cautioned that implementations could be painful. He said SOA often required large capital investments in infrastructure and middleware. Therefore, he recommended organisations should allow sufficient time and resources for planning SOA implementations and establish realistic expectations.
Appel also advocated starting the migration to services on the edges of organisations before gradually working towards core business processes in step with changes in the business culture.
"Organisations should plan for multi-year incremental implementations of SOA, avoid the wild implementation of services, and never forget that IT is about the business," he said.
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