How to Manage Within SOA's 'Free Market'

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January 09, 2007

How to Manage Within SOA's 'Free Market'

Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, famously said that "the best way to get out of trouble is not to get into it in the first place," and those charged with SOA projects would do well to heed his advice and create a foundation for SOA governance, management and quality as early as possible.

Ian Bruce, of Systinet/Mercury/HP, says the free market of economics and the emerging free market of business services have a lot in common. In both cases, free markets unleash the power of innovation and drive progress, but need some measure of oversight to keep things from getting out of hand.

As Ian puts it, in many ways IT executives responsible for SOA face the same problems as Bernanke, who "needs to support a free market that makes maximum use of economic resources with minimum governance, interventions and safeguards." Likewise, Ian points out, "IT leaders implementing SOA need to support a free market of business services that makes maximum use of IT resources with minimum governance, interventions and safeguards. The goal is to govern enough to ensure maximum business benefits, while mitigating risks."

This is where SOA governance comes in. I have had the opportunity to work with Ian on projects in the past, and consider him a "go-to" guy when it comes to questions about governance. Ian has just put together a checklist for ebizQ, which should include the following elements:

SOA visibility and information management: "Visibility ensures that services can be easily found and understood by service consumers, and that consumers have access to a 360° view of a service at every phase of its lifecycle. SOA needs a single system-of-record for services and all the related metadata surrounding services."

SOA policy management: "The nature of SOA (highly distributed, heterogeneous and very dynamic) means that it is critical for SOA artifacts to be governed by specific business, technical and regulatory policies. A policy might specify that orders from a premium customer will be routed to a high-performance server, or that financial transactions require data encryption and authentication. An SOA policy defines configurable rules and conditions that affect services during both design time and run time."

SOA contracts: "A service contract should provide a precise and unambiguous definition of how the provider and consumer interact. Contracts are typically created at the point of service consumption. But this is not to say that they must be rewritten each and every time. Many contracts can and should be retained and reused to form the basis for many provider/consumer agreements and, thus, contracts represent another important SOA artifact that should be managed for reuse."

SOA lifecycle management: "The only way to achieve the full promise of SOA is by managing services and other SOA information across this complete lifecycle."

Posted by joemckendrick in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us