SOA governance demands a human face

Some insightful words from Cape Clear CEO Annrai O'Toole:

While governance affects the entire application life-cycle, the critical issues relate to the challenges highly distributed development imposes on human-to-human communication during design-time. We believe that the right tools to design and manage all the human aspects of SOA look more like a Wiki than a formal database. Real people need to build and manage SOAs and a service should make as much sense to a business user as it should to a developer. The Wiki metaphor (and indeed its implementation) is the perfect vehicle for sharing and managing SOA artifacts across an organisation. Then if anyone makes a change to a service that you are interested in, RSS should be able to inform you when that happens and you can make any necessary changes.

 I agree we should tread warily to SOA without addressing the anthropologic issues, and a trussed up respository is not the proper means. Giving governance a human dimension vis a vis wikis and RSS-driven event and alert collaboration suits how people work now. (Full disclosure: Cape Clear is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.)