SasiKanth's (SOA-Everywhere)

SOA Governance & its importance

While most of the enterprises are mastering the art of SOA compliance, and some of the enterprises which are in early stages of adoption realizing the ROI and the way it is impacting their Business bottom line. Well its a positive direction in which enterprise business is growing by leveraging SOA Foundation principles, but to what degree of SOA Governance models are adopted in practice is still a question & its a key factor to measure successful SOA Transformation. Moreover the SOA Tools that these enterprises are using drives the SOA adoption for enterprises. In this blog I would like to discuss "SOA Governance & its importance" which I personally feel as neglected aspect of SOA in most enterprises. Also I would like to define some of the best practices of SOA Governance.

Defined -

Governance: Governance is an act of dealing, observing, controlling a System execution & evolution (with actors/people, process/procedures) by protecting long term strategies to achieve Goals.

SOA Governance – Its a software IT management practice in which various individual governing policies viz., “Architectural governance policies,, Service design, creation, life-cycle governance policies” can be defined and enforced and acts like crux of IT Governance to deliver a better IT management.

Why SOA governance is important

A proper SOA governance facilitates enterprises to create more re-usable business service components across various other individual business units. The major intricacy here is “creation of a software service which is usable across enterprise/organization”. Remember that in typical enterprise business each individual business unit can have several tens of applications running, and for these applications to work with newly created services is not straight forward unless the new Creation happens with certain standards, certain interoperable rules & regulations. The complexity here is not the existing applications which are deployed and making the business to run, but it lies in how new services are getting created and what are the standards that services are offering to be 100% interoperable & reusable.

Once a service is created and comes into existence the next biggest challenge is how to enforce that these services are not duplicated across business organizations. Considering the size of bigger enterprises and the way in which they communicate with each other – unless individual business units works with a governance body which takes care of defining standards, enforces policies for not promoting duplicate redundant services.

The need of SOA governance is limited at a creation level but it can be spanned at several other service management life cycle aspects viz,. Service registry, service delivery, service change management during deployment, service standards interoperability, service compliance at business level. It is highly required for enterprises to enforce governing policies around each and every aspect of service life cycle as mentioned above. The best way of enforcing is by comparing all incumbent services, existing services against a standards checklist at each phase of service life cycle management. Here is a snapshot of where SOA Governance can play a role

> Service Incubation: The process in which a functional requirement can be identified as a “Enterprise level business service” than at an application level service.

> Service Architecture & Design: Principles used to definite the architecture, design to ensure services will fit to run at an enterprise level to be in compliance.

> Service Publishing, Interoperability, Accessibility – The mechanism through which enterprise can publish services for readiness, technology choices to make them interoperable, provide rules of accessibility along with service delivery, security definitions.

Unless enterprises stipulates required regulations around above said areas it is very difficult to bring the predictability of service behavior to be managed at IT teams. An enterprise is successful on SOA foundation only when it creates and deploys more and more reusable software services with minimal requirements to customize, providing maximum benefit from the standards it supports, level of interoperability it offers and business compliances it achieves. Simply making a fragile SOA applications across business functional areas with technology integration compliance is not enough to get the maximum ROI from SOA, in order to get the maximum ROI from SOA enterprises imperatively adopt SOA Governance policies, SOA Govering solutions facilitating policy enforcement and management.

  Best Practices

• Create SOA Governance dedicated team which can function as a subset of IT Policy management team.

• Define Governing principles in enterprises SDLC policy, this is very useful for technology teams to understand the bigger expectations of services being developed and deployed.

• Compose a service with emphasis on separating Operations/functionality of service with manageability,administration by providing Standards based meta-data about services.

• Understand the need of having a specific function of business to be demarcated as SOA Level reusable service component accessible across other applications. Simply do not demarcate all functions as services just for the sake of it. Unless a business function is well qualified with justification one should not develop and manage functions as SOA services.

•   Separate Governance policies for Development, Publishing and management of services. This will help to federate governing policies and enforce them with different teams responsible for service development, deployment and using.

Posted at 01:21PM Oct 03, 2007 by Sasikanth Tenneti in Personal  |  Comments[0]