In today's news, ebizQ reports on a new bulletin issued by Butler Group which made the case that any and all SOA depends on governance. However, as Butler Group states, governance is more than putting a bunch of technologies in place, be they registries or repositories. The real issue is on an organizational level -- often, services are put into production long before governance comes along, and then everything has to be retrofitted.
As we have found in surveys conducted here at ebizQ, most early SOA efforts do not have governance of any kind in place -- typically, organizations hold off until they have some type of critical mass of services before they consider it worth investing in governance. As Butler's Rob Hailstone put it: "Most organizations deploying SOA leave it too late to implement effective governance. The longer you leave it, the more difficult it becomes to 'retrofit' governance to an operational SOA environment. However, the effort must be made if the SOA initiative is not to descend into chaos."
The recent ebizQ survey, conducted in partnership with SAP, finds that even companies with the most advanced SOA deployments – in terms of enterprise reach and number of reusable services – have yet to formulate governance strategies or methods to measure the value of their SOA to the business. The survey finds that only one out of seven companies currently have active governance efforts underway.
The low level of governance is perhaps not that surprising, since many organizations are just starting their SOA implementations. What was eye-opening about the survey, however, was that even among the most advanced sites surveyed, two out of three companies do not yet have comprehensive governance programs in place. In addition, many respondents see their current or planned governance programs as being ineffective, the survey finds. Even among the most advanced SOA efforts, governance is not delivering its full value.
I recently joined SAP's Christian Hastedt Marckwardt in a Webcast discussing the survey results, and the evolving role of SOA governance. (Click here to access the full Webcast.)
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