SOA - Governance Principles

Definition:-

Governance is the application of controls to processes that change corporate assets, with a view to ensuring that those assets comply with (or move towards compliance with) with a set of corporate goals

Governance Needs Balance:-

Given the necessary overheads of governance, a balance needs to be struck between too much governance (which will cripple processes), and too little governance (which will result in chaos).

Governance Needs A Raison D’être:-

Governance only makes sense against a backdrop of well-defined drivers and goals. For example, an organisation may decide to standardise on a particular architecture, or tool set, for reasons of reduced total cost of ownership. Governance would be used to drive or direct changes to current assets in compliance with these goals.

Governance Must Be Effective:-

Effective governance will impose light-weight, thorough and widely-accepted controls around the changes being applied to those assets. Governance that is seen as pointless, or a hindrance to progress, will be resisted and ineffective.

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What is Service Oriented Architecture - SOA - Accepting Change

"The only constant is change" and the world of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is no different. No matter how much upfront business process modeling is done, or how perfect your service granularity is, or how wonderfully compliant you are with WS-*, the reality is that your services will have to change to keep pace with change - business agility implies change. And if your SOA has been working, there should be a whole host of consumers of those services who will not be happy at all with having to change. Change involves project cost, cost requires budgetary approval, and approval requires a Business appetite for the change. But since the change won't always appear to benefit the Business, it will very often not be approved, and your SOA will go the way of most system landscapes: to legacy, riddled with complexity, redundancy and consequent fragility.

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What do I put in my SOA service registry?

I'll talk later about asset management, but for now, what exactly belongs in the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) service registry?

Well, services obviously, stupid.

But what about stored procedures? Or legacy, remotely invokeable services? Or batch feeds? Or ETL (Extract Transform and Load)?

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SOA Service Registry/Repository

How exciting. At long last I am a working somewhere with thousands of services, a SOA registry/repository, a service registrar and established governance processes around the use of services.

Could life get any better for an SOA believer?

Yes, because unfortunately some groups have decided that all this stuff is too much bother and have come to a peer-peer arrangement regarding the use of services.

So the registry is inaccurate.

So the whole house of cards collapses in a horrible, useless heap.

You see, reuse like recycling only works if the there are practical as well as ideological reasons for doing it. In this case either the governance was not strong enough, or the populace were not sufficiently bought into the enterprise benefit of SOA. Take your pick.

Lesson? A registry does not an SOA make, whereas an organisation (emphasis on organise) just might have a chance.

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