Telltale signs of SOA governance deficit

Are there any "telltale signs" that an organization is missing the governance boat when it comes to efforts to effectively deploy SOA methodologies? Todd Biske, enterprise architect extraordinaire and author of the recently published work on SOA Governance, observes that many organizations may have conflicting priorities that emerge when it comes to SOA-based projects. "Telltale signs are when you are having meeting after meeting with people disagreeing and saying, 'Well, my management told me this is my priority,' and somebody else is saying, 'My management is telling me this priority,'" Todd observed.

SOA governance should provide a structure to address competing priorities, and get the right people involved, Todd said in Dana Gardner's latest BriefingsDirect analyst podcast. (Transcript also available.)

There are two types of risk managers and companies assume when they start into service oriented architecture. One is that you create a service and nobody uses it. However, having too much success with SOA may even be riskier.

As Todd explains, if things go too far too quickly and you have too much success with SOA, "perhaps it spins out of control, and complexity, lack of monitoring and enforcement become issues." Good SOA governance is the key to maintaining the balance on such risks, he says.

There was also some discussion among the panel's analysts about the tendency toward deployments of SOA governance "lite," which may less onerous or overbearing than full-fledged governance. Todd, however, said he doesn't believe that such a things as SOA governance lite exists, pointing out that governance or no governance, someone is always making a decision on the direction of SOA projects.

"I'm not a believer in the term 'lite' governance," Todd said. "I'm of the opinion that you have governance, whether you admit it or not. An alternative view of governance is that it is a decision-rights structure.... Someone is always making decision on projects. ...no matter what, you always have governance on projects."

Todd encourages SOA governance to be as enterprise-focused -- or as centralized -- as possible. "The risk you have in becoming too federated, and getting too many decisions made locally, is that you lose sight of the bigger picture," he says.

While SOA has taken its share of knocks from critics over the past year or so, Todd sees it as the best route to IT and corporate productivity:

"The reason companies should be adopting SOA is that something has to change. There is something about the way IT is working with the rest of the business that isn't operating as efficiently and as productively as it could. And, if there is a change that has to go on, how do you manage that change and how do you make sure it happens? It's not just buying a tool, or applying some new technology. There has to be a more systematic process for how we manage that change, and to me that's all about governance."