Federated SOA Governance Whitepaper

With help from my colleague Jason English, iTKO has just pushed out a whitepaper on Federated SOA Governance. This paper includes a few concepts introduced first here on these blog entries but provides a great deal more context, not to mention Jason’s pretty pictures ;)

Read the new whitepaper here: http://www.itko.com/site/resources/whitepaper.jsp

Jason by the way is quite the Renaissance man. Being our VP of Corporate Marketing and an SOA Quality pundit in his own right should be enough, but add to that his brewery, singer/songwriter/musician talents, local political involvement, and the recent engagement to his beautiful and engaging fiancé, and I’m just amazed. Congrats Jason and Elena! Now back to our story.

“Federated” is a word we geeks use when we talk about data that distributed all over the organization, or what businesspeople try to do when they can’t tackle the whole problem themselves. Of course for those versed in US history, The Federalist or the Federalist Papers are all about how some of the founding fathers wanted us to understand the US Constitution. A significant theme was the proper restraint at the highest level of government and the delegation of much authority to those governmental organizations that were considered closer to the people.

The goal was to allow a freer form of self government than a super-sized federal government could provide but also enable that loosely coupled aggregate to behave with enough commonality that trade, communication, and consistency in the most important matters was still possible.

Much of the goal of “Federated SOA,” then, is to come up with an approach that can work around the conventional vertical hierarchies associated with company structures, and allow for “horizontal trust” between those underlying states, or departments, so they have the authority to act to fulfill their own operational needs, but the incentive to cooperate with other groups to fulfill common goals defined by the Federated SOA.

Gee, what a model for our comparatively simple SOAs! Smaller companies will achieve SOA success without the overhead of a federated system, but large companies and certainly inter-organizational SOA will likely not.

Thus the purpose for delivering this paper, and talking about how some of the mechanics of its workings should take shape. I hope you enjoy the read, and we always welcome comments.