Most companies that have functioning SOAs in place are pretty sour on the state of their governance solutions. While about 17 percent say their governance is sufficent, another 40 percent say it is not sufficient. The rest aren't quite sure yet.
However, in cases where automation is introduced to facilitate governance, the picture changes. Those sites that have runtime and design-time automation are far more likely to report high levels of comfort with their governance solution than those who rely on manual enforcement.
These are the findings of a survey of 313 companies, presented in a recent Webinar by Beth Gold-Bernstein. (The Webinar is archived here.)
"It turns out that the biggest differentiator between those that feel their governance solution is sufficient, and those who believe their governance solution is not sufficient, is the degree of runtime automation," Beth explained. "Those that have runtime automation have an automated solution that is managing governance policies whenever these services are being accessed and run have far higher levels of confidence." She added that "while design-time automation is good, runtime automation is going to be absolutely essential as organizations move down the path to SOA."
The new survey also had some additional surprises. For example, that business goals -- versus IT efficiency -- are driving most SOA deployments at this time. Almost two out of respondents, 64 percent, said that the goal of their SOA effort is to "increase business agility," followed by "IT reuse" at 57 percent. "Business process optimization" followed with 55 percent, and another 44 percent sought the advantages of composite application development.
"When we looked at what the most popular combinations were, they were increased business agility and IT use, increased business agility and business process optimization," Beth said. "That led us to the conclusion that SOA adoption is really business driven, it is not just for reducing IT costs. SOA is more of a business initiative than an IT initiative."
Of course, it's still early in the SOA game, and the survey confirms this as well: Almost half of all respondents have fewer than 10 services actually deployed, while fewer than 20 percent have at least 50 services in production.
But it's never too soon to start thinking of governance, as explained by Brenda Michelson, who joined Beth in the Webinar. "I believe that governance enters the SOA picture when the first policy is set," she said. "Typically, this is during the technology proof of concept, and the first policies are on the design side, service interface design, and what technology protocols you’re going to use – Web services, REST, XML, HTTP. An organization might need to introduce runtime governance in their first project."
Following her analysis of the survey results, Beth made a good case for runtime automation for governance: "Current governance enforcement is primarily manual, and apparently, the most respondents do not think this is sufficient, and they are right to worry. Manual practices will cause significant issues in managing the effects of policy changes, especially as the number of employed serices increases... The demands for SOA governance will overwhelm the capacity for manual controls and enforcement. Automated solutions for both design time and runtime governance are necessary to manage large-scale SOA implementations."
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