Six Ways to Drive SOA Governance into Your Organization

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February 13, 2007

Six Ways to Drive SOA Governance into Your Organization

Here's a good example of policies put in place to drive desirable outcomes: Federal tax credits, along with access to high-occupancy vehicle lanes on the freeways, have helped boost the number of hybrid vehicles registered in the state of California.

That example, put forth by Oracle's Mohamad Afshar and Ben Moreland of The Hartford in a new article published here at eBizQ, draws comparisons between public policy used to encourage certain behaviors, and corporate policies intended to encourage certain behaviors in the development and use of technology.

Many departments, including developers, may be set in their ways, and may need some form of encouragement to sign on to the SOA program.

Afshar and Moreland outline the six steps to successful SOA governance:

1: Define goals and strategy. "A company's SOA strategy must complement and support its goals and business objectives," they said. "This point cannot be overstated."

2: Define policies and procedures. Policies and procedures are as varied as the organization itself. The key is to "clearly state who has decision and input rights in formulating specific policies, how the policies are communicated, how the execution of those policies is monitored, and how adjustments can be made to the policies based on real-life experience."

3: Define metrics for success. This is key for putting the right governance structure in place, Afshar and Moreland say. Such metrics include "the number of projects adhering to processes for project execution, the number of reference architectures leveraged, usability of the reference architectures, the number of exceptions and the reasons for each, the number of sharable services created, the number of applications leveraging the shared services, and the cost saved by reusing an existing service."

4: Put governance mechanisms in place. These include "policies, procedures, enforcement, methods of monitoring, exception handling mechanisms, and so on." Be sure to get executive support to put some muscle behind the program, Afshar and Moreland state.

5: Analyze and improve processes. Be sure to "measure the progress that you have made on your SOA Roadmap, relaxing overly restrictive policies where it makes sense and taking corrective action where necessary."

6: Keep refining your SOA. Re-evaluate, re-evaluate, re-evaluate. SOA is a continuous process.

Just as some new cars can draw upon both gasoline-powered combustion and stored electric power, an SOA is a "hybrid" that draws on multiple resources across the enterprise. Perhaps service-oriented architectures can also help achieve more efficiencies.

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