If you built a CoE (Center of Excellence), every time an analyst told you to, there’d be more CoE’s than there were desks in the IT Dept. But of all the areas where a CoE might be most critical, an enterprise-wide SOA initiative would be one of them.
In most organizations, vertical trust up and down the chain of command is relatively easy to come by and already exists. The line of reporting structure typically creates the sense of reuse, standardization, and the ability to leverage vertically within an organization.
But at the highest levels, horizontally across peer groups, that is usually not the case. Ironically, a lot of organizations I’ve seen tend to foster distrust and create an anti-collaboration spirit between those horizontal peer groups. We’ll have to resolve this for SOA to work. That is why creating horizontal trust is such a critical aspect to SOA adoption.
Grossly generalizing, when bad things happen within an organization vertically, the thinking is ‘hey we’re in this together so let’s work it out’. That same issue occurring across an organization horizontally would more likely sound like ‘those guys are morons -- I’m not going to make the mistake of relying on them again!’…
One of the ways that it’s possible to combat that trust concern, and instill a sense of trust, is through a center of excellence around SOA. To instill trust horizontally and make SOA adoption possible, we need to use an analogy from a States’ rights vs. Federal rights debate. The individual divisions need to consider themselves autonomous on certain levels, and bestowing certain rights to the Federal level; but they also have the opportunity to participate at that Federal level, so that it isn’t just a “Down from Above” edict that will immediately create a defensive reaction instead of an embrace.
So, if we think about what the SOA CoE must look like then, certainly there needs to be a set of participants that are not beholden to any particular one of the divisions involved, but there also needs to be significant membership from all of those who will be involved so that we get the participation – this isn’t US vs. THEM – this SOA CoE is a self-governing model.
This organization will model what policies need to be so-called Federal Policies and which can safely be handled at the State level. For example, we talk about policy that can be automated along the three domains: structural, behavioral, and performance. It might be quite accurate to say that at the Federal level, structural policy (or compliance) might be the most important aspect, while from a State-to-State kind of policy, behavioral and performance policies will perhaps be most important to define at those levels.
Take that one step further: SOA Governance needs to be explicit about how to publish a service, and precisely what is involved in consuming an existing service. Whether it’s within the same division or across divisions, the behavior and performance policies need to be authored, automated and enforced.
I hope this has made some sense in that without this kind of CoE, we are in a very difficult position when we are trying to create that horizontal trust. We must create a better way to provide SOA visibility across the organization, which is historically not very easy to do.
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