SOA or State Of Anarchy? Governance Makes the Difference

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March 29, 2007

SOA or State Of Anarchy? Governance Makes the Difference

"There is no easy way of describing an ungoverned SOA." - Mark Greeff

In a new interview, Software AG's Mark Greeff talks about how governance makes the difference between a well-managed SOA and a 'State Of Anarchy.'

Take rogues services, for example. Greeff observes that rogue projects typically aren't registered from a design time perspective. He says that governance controls within an SOA environment should "focus on providing a run-time governance engine to discover these rogue services." Endpoints need to be managed, and sites should "have the ability to have an exchange service model between the run-time world and the design-time world." Rogue services should be detected, and registered back to the design-time platform.

Can an effective governance platform bring IT and the business together? Greeff thinks so. "One of the things that you seen in the whole governance story are that there has been an organizational governance platform -- people have talked about organizational governance for a while," he observes. "What we are doing now is to bring together that corporate governance model and IT governance model into an SOA governance platform."

Effective SOA governance oversight means "being able to analyze and plan projects a lot better and being able to visualize all integration artifact dependencies," says Greeff.

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