Taking choice out of governance

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance, says Gartner*, can be defined as “the processes that ensure the effective and efficient use of SOA in enabling an organisation to achieve its goals”. More precisely, Gartner says, SOA governance comprises policies, procedures and rules.

“Management 'lives' governance; compliance with SOA governance processes 'demonstrates' governance.

Governance arrangements take a long time to design and install, and are difficult to enforce. But, without them, every SOA project out of its pilot phase would be at risk.”

With the widespread adoption of SOA, Gartner says, the challenges associated with SOA projects are emerging. Technology-related issues remain significant, particularly in the areas of runtime management, monitoring and testing, all of which are critical to overcoming SOA-related performance, reliability and interoperability issues.

Without [governance], every SOA project out of its pilot phase would be at risk.

Gartner

However, through 2010, the lack of working SOA governance arrangements will be the most common reason for SOA failures. The biggest barriers to SOA adoption will be non-technical issues related to inadequate governance, lack of clear value metrics, poorly defined requirements and scope, and insufficient business involvement in project prioritisation and service identification.

“SOA governance isn't an option,” Gartner states. “It's an imperative. The bigger the SOA environment, the more co-ordination and governance it needs, and the more complex the governance roles and mechanisms must be.

“Growing an effective SOA environment with discipline (for example, by enabling agility, enforcing service re-use and avoiding service duplication) is a major issue for technology users and providers. It's possible only through carefully designed and consistently enforced governance procedures.”

Consequently, SOA governance offerings have proliferated in the market in two forms:

1. SOA governance technology that builds on policy management. Most self-defining

SOA governance offerings address only a narrow set of design or operation policies, missing the wider SOA governance picture.

2. SOA governance consulting services built on general service identification methodologies. These services involve some concept of SOA centre of excellence, which is an integration competency centre empowered by stronger governance processes, organised in a framework.

“These two approaches are not mutually exclusive,” Gartner notes. “It's common to start with SOA governance software because it's generally offered by the same vendors of SOA infrastructure.

“Other companies approach SOA governance by looking for consulting services first, in which case, the organisational changes are implemented in parallel with the use of some SOA governance software. Recently, a new breed of innovative vendors started to address much higher-level organisational issues, with software that gives visibility into and control over the growth of an SOA project.”

Key governance issues that organisations looking to implement SOA need to bear in mind are:

* What are the roles of the various SOA COE components in governing SOA projects?
* What is an SOA governance framework and what does it look like?
* How can SOA governance technologies be used profitably when building an SOA governance framework?
* How can SOA projects be successfully governed toward real business value?

* Source: Key Issues in SOA Governance, 2008, Paolo Malinverno, L. Frank Kenney, 29 August 2008. Report courtesy of Gartner.