Editor of eBizQ Peter Schooff recently asked a small group of us pundits to post questions to their new expert Forum site, and this week he ran a question from me that we've been asking our customers: Are we meaningfully Applying SOA Governance?
"While we've seen a large number of firms realizing significant value from SOA approaches, are companies truly leveraging SOA Governance principles across their entire design, development and delivery lifecycle? Are solutions such as Service Management, UDDI Registry/Repositories, Testing and Validation being employed as part of this effort? How can SOA Governance accomplish greater adoption levels in today's enterprise environments?"
Our friend Miko Matsumura from Software AG said a resounding yes, and chalks success up to behavioral change and not tooling: "Today, the 'install software and it just works' concept is all but moot. Despite the desire of software that 'just works', the value obtained by software is pretty much only attainable when the organization changes its behavior, for example in a business process."
Author Michael Poulin chimed in and extended the business responsibility aspect, while cautioning that any organization leveraging the tools before the principles has already lost. Fair point, and one reinforced by Joe McKendrick later in the column.
JP Morgenthal also noted from a technology perspective: "I believe a lot of implementations give 'lip service"' to governance and will implement the registry as part of the ESB support requirements, but do not have a plan for how to move beyond this phase of implementation." This is very much in line with what we've seen. Perhaps this will be the year people start utilizing these tools hand in hand.
This particular topic has been ongoing for some time here (see our blog post from a couple years ago on "Wringing Value out of UDDI Enforcement and Policy" or click on our SOA Governance category). We often find that without disciplined practices, and without a proper means of validation and enforcement of the Policies defined in a Registry/Repository or Service Management solution, the SOA Governance initiative faces some challenges.
In any case I am really enjoying the caliber of these ongoing discussions, and look for us to comment more when interesting topics come up.
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