Everyone talks about SOA governance these days, but few have been able to get their arms around it. Experts I spoke with for the recent InfoWorld series of podcasts talked about the challenges associated with SOA governance, and ways to address these challenges to assure greater SOA ROI.
In this first part, experts discuss the challenges of SOA governance.
For starters, SOA governance is often treated too narrowly within many organizations. IONA’s Pat Walsh says governance should address the broad lifecycle of SOA services, rather than get pigeonholed into environments. “I'm a fan of Darryl Plumber at Gartner, and he has a great saying about whereas people are trying to categorize things as design time and runtime, nowadays it's really design time, runtime, and all the time. Because you can't say that once I've designed something and I've put it into a run-time environment, I'm done.”
BEA’s Theo Beack says low visibility of services stymies governance efforts as well. “Visibility is insight into what exists, what assets exist within the organization,” he explains. “Visibility into which of these things have been employed? How have they been used?” Lack of visibility of services has a direct impact on any ROI that can be achieved, Theo says. “Many organizations find when they create all these wonderful things, that adoption and reuse is much lower than what they either anticipated or what they think would be required to get a positive outcome in ROI.”
The time and effort involved in enforcing policies also stymies governance efforts, Theo adds. “Once they implement the processes and the tools and so forth, they realized they just implemented more barriers from the personnel and the developers and all those people involved in the process, it becomes very time-consuming to really properly enforce all the policies, to follow the appropriate processes and so forth. It really becomes a challenge to motivate people to follow the governance rules and policies.”
Oracle’s Dave Chappell points to organizational and corporate culture issues that make effective governance a challenge. “You're changing your software processes where you used to have where silos of applications that performed specific business functions. And you had, along with that, siloed organizations that were built in support of those applications. And, since the applications never really communicated with each other that well, it was also not necessary for the organizations to communicate, share and work together that well, either.”
Because SOA seeks to open up many processes and systems, SOA proponents may run into headwinds from their owners, Dave continues. “Now we're talking about tearing down application silos, picking apart individual pieces of business functionality that's within each one of those applications, opening that up and sharing that across departmental boundaries, across organizational boundaries and building new automated composite applications that really share pieces of what used to be siloed application.”
This new openness and sharing mandated by SOA may create stresses across organizations, Dave says. “That brings some interesting challenges and questions of, who's going own these new composite applications that span across the different, what used to be siloed applications? What's the new ownership model across that? What's the new organization model going to be in support of that? How are different architectural teams going to work together and decide what goes and what stays in terms of, you know, the IT consolidation that's occurring from new SOA initiatives. How are the business functions also going to be realigned in order to work together better? And then -- most importantly: How are the technology and the business folks going to work together effectively?”
In part 2 of this two-part post, the experts address solutions to the SOA governance challenge.
Check out the full podcast interviews (MP3 downloads) with the experts here:
David Nichols, Accenture
Theo Beack, BEA
Pat Walsh, IONA
Dave Chappell, Oracle
Hub Vandervoort, Progress
These podcasts were part of this fall's SOA Executive Forum, produced by InfoWorld. ebizQ, in cooperation with InfoWorld, has published a special supplement on SOA: Building a Foundation for Continuous Change. The report features interviews with the industry’s top practitioners to reveal the best practices, customer case studies and industry surveys that you can use to transform you tactical SOA systems into the right strategic mix of governance, and integration with complementary technologies like BPM that will increase the depths and directions of your business agility.
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