The Aberdeen Group just released a report, SOA Governance: Separating Success from Chaos, that speaks to the heart of some of the most critical issues in SOA success. We have written about SOA governance many times on this blog. As the report pointed out, SOA governance expands on the notion of IT governance, because of the increased complexity and interrelationships between services. To get real business benefits, proper SOA governance needs to be set up from the start. At the same time, the greatest challenge they found for managing SOA was the establishment of security, governance, and management. Aberdeen looked at what best-in-class SOA companies are doing in terms of governance and related issues.
First they defined best-in-class SOA companies (the top 20%) as those that achieved these four business results:
- Reduced costs from re-use of existing services (23% on average)
- Reduced time needed for IT to respond to business demands (18% on average)
- Reduced application development time (23% on average)
- Increased the number of services re-used. (37% on average)
The results showed that those enjoying the best-in-class performance shared several characteristics.
- 82% provide training to SOA project staff
- 78% establish and monitor Service Level Agreements
- 77% monitor efficiency
SOA governance is implemented to do more than reduce costs. That was actually the number three driver after the desire to increase business agility and optimize business and IT alignment. Drivers four and five that followed cost reductions, were to better respond to business demands for new applications and increase the effectiveness of existing applications. So while cost reduction is often a selling point for SOA, increasing business performance seems to be emerging as the major rationale. This more strategic focus requires the attention and guidance of senior management -- obtaining the commitment of senior execs to SOA implementation was seen as the top strategy success factor.
Companies are also using SOA to help with risk management, which is very important in today’s economy. The increased visibility, decreased time for application development, and established management tools mapped to business processes that effective SOA governance provides can help organizations more efficiently response to business or regulatory changes.
The report provides many specifics on what best-in-class companies are doing to achieve the goals and the business results they obtained. I also found it interesting that, in addition to governance concerns, the survey also found that two of the top six SOA challenges were related to testing. You can view the complete report at this link to SOA Governance: Separating Success from Chaos. (It is a protected document, so you can Print it to paper or a PDF if you want to read it offline.)
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