Invest in early SOA governance to avoid project failure

That is one of the key findings by analyst Butler Group in its advisory report on the subject, just published. The report, ‘SOA Governance’, says that while technology support will be required, governance is primarily an organisational issue, with the emphasis on putting the right people in the right roles, and giving them the authority to ensure that the architecture is consistent with business aims and requirements. “Most organisations deploying SOA leave it too late to implement effective governance,” says Rob Hailstone, software infrastructure practice director at Butler Group. “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 report also suggests that developing a SOA environment remains important – including for manufacturing businesses – because it provides significant potential to improve the ‘value’ they derive from their IT investments. And it defines value in terms of increased flexibility, improved use of assets, alignment with business objectives, and reduced integration costs. Hailstone makes the point that while most descriptions of SOA governance focus on the technology-centric run-time environment, this represents just a small part of the overall governance effort. “The ideal time for an organisation to commit to SOA governance is right at the start... One of the disruptive aspects of SOA that is often missed in early projects is that all resources in a SOA need to be shared – and this means traditional budget-holder ownership models are a very poor fit, leading to much frustration further down the line.” Technologies that support a SOA governance initiative include service registries to provide the system of record for service discovery, metadata repositories to assist in version management and impact analysis, monitoring tools to provide run-time visibility into the health and activity of the environment, and policy enforcement technology.