We recently read an article specific to the Federal Government's efforts that was very interesting and relevant. Our work with government agencies has exposed us to the concept of "Net-Centricity" which is a more overarching term than SOA. Net-Centricity (in my informal definition) represents a commitment of all departments and parties, across different authority domains, to work together to meet common goals through IT.
No matter how advanced the architecture design is, SOA alone won't deliver the vision of Net Centricity, with its expected agility, reuse and functionality benefits for the warfighter - if there is not trust instilled between teams and authority domains that must share and support an alphabet soup of IT systems and services. So in essence, the government's Net-Centric effort mirrors SOA and IT Governance efforts.
We recently read an article from Federal IT consultant Warren Suss that does a great job of covering this topic, titled "Streamlining IT Governance." It is good to hear someone talking about this. SOA Governance requires testing and certification of services, to ensure that there are no unintended consequences of change that can impact mission threads (or "workflows" in layman's terms).
In previous posts we have mentioned how Federal agencies are ahead of the business world in many aspects of SOA - due in no small part to this shared mission. In this space, we have seen these Net-Centric plans come a long way toward delivering a high level of quality and shared responsibility over the last 3-4 years.
Suss states: "Today, we recognize that important information can reside anywhere in the enterprise. What’s needed is a way to allow users with the need to know to get their hands on trusted information from anywhere in the network. Governance decisions, as much as technology decisions, determine the standards, rules, infrastructure and services that enable — or hinder -- the rapid discovery and sharing of information and capabilities."
We agree that Net-Centricity is about the practice first. Federal agencies seek to control a web of compartmentalized systems, by federating governance, so the teams that support the systems have some centralized standards, but not so much control that teams don't have local authority over local issues.
We must also talk about the technologies that support the federated environment of agencies and teams leveraging shared services. Strong testing and SOA policy validation on a continuous basis is crucial for ensuring trust in this type of shared environment. We also have a lot of research around Service Virtualization capabilities that eliminate the dependencies and constraints of these shared environments. When we can break interdependency and access constraints with virtual services, teams are able to develop and test without stepping on each others' toes in the software delivery lifecycle.
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