How much of a difference does effective governance make in SOA? Apparently a big difference.
Aberdeen Group has just completed and published a survey of 950 companies, and concluded that "between a third and half.. are having serious difficulties getting their SOA-enabled applications into stable deployment."
Not everybody is having such trouble, though.
What the research group calls "Best in Class" companies -- the top-performing 20% of the respondent base -- are far more likely to be reporting positive ROI on their SOA investments, as well as lower application development costs. Sixty-eight percent of these companies are reporting good results from SOA, compared to only 23% of the overall survey group.
Of course, SOA success -- especially positive ROI -- is a difficult thing to measure. The Best in Classers may have already had the measurement mechanisms in place to see the success, while the rest of the bunch may be having some success without realizing it. (Or the opposite.)
But the Aberdeen survey also looked at the best practices of the Best in Classers, and found one common denominator, which is highly significant. Almost all had solid governance structures in place, and many had automated this process.
Aberdeen observes that the BIC bunch have implemented design-time governance and re-use policy to minimize lifecycle service costs compared to 26% overall. In addition, more than 80% of the BIC bunch has implemented an automated solution to SOA operations and governance.
Last fall, ebizQ conducted and published a survey that also demonstrated the advantages of automating as much governance as possible.
The survey of 313 companies found that 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.
As ebizQ colleague Beth Gold-Bernstein explains it: "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. 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."
A Webinar on the complete ebizQ survey is archived here.
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