iTKO's John Michelsen recently served on ebizQ's SOA Governance panel for a spirited online discussion. Joe McKendrick moderated the panel which also included: Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director with Burton Group, and former Chief Technology Officer at Systinet; Ron Schmelzer, managing partner with ZapThink; Frank Martinez, senior vice president, product strategy for SOA Software; David Bressler, SOA Evangelist for the Actional products at Progress Software; and Ed Horst, vice president of marketing and product strategy for AmberPoint. Joe provided both a summary, Panel: SOA Governance Answers 'What's in it for Me?' Question, and the full transcript: see Transcript: SOA Governance Panel.
Joe charged the panelists to comment on how far along we really are with SOA, and what is needed to take things to the next level. He also wanted them to be practical, and explore the tools and techniques that are essential to getting started with SOA governance. In addition the discussion focused on the implications of SOA governance for the "Web 2.0-ish" activities (like Cloud and WOA) that are often well under the radar of corporate IT management. Lastly, he wanted to cover one of our favorite topics, virtualization and SOA.
As Joe said in the summary, setting up proper governance seems like the logical approach to introduce SOA to the business. However, in the real world, SOA proponents run up against a series of obstacles. Many stakeholders have to be signed on to the SOA effort. These include developers who are expected to reuse someone else's code, departments that are expected to share assets and timelines, functional groups that are expected to provide more funding than usual to the IT underlying their processes with the hope for future cost savings and greater agility.
In response to these challenges John suggested that a Federated approach may be essential to SOA governance. In effect, people may be more willing to accept governance at more decentralized levels, rather than more centralized approaches:
"We found that it is very analogous to the governance analogy in the physical world. That federating or layering of the governance policy is how it happens. If you think about it, my homeowners association, it wants to know where I'm going to put my flag. But at the Federal level.. that would be an absurd notion for them to decide such a thing. So we are more tolerant of greater control closest to us, than we are far away. So if there’s this very distant group of people who decide on how we are supposed to build and consume services, then we will tend to react negatively toward that. But if there is even.. a fairly onerous set of policies, but it’s shared, and its owned by me and my close constituents, I tend to be more willing to do it."
Later John added that since SOA has been around for a while, we know in advance a number of things that require planning, including aspects of the governance requirements. The solutions require more that installing infrastructure, they require an understanding of the desired business behaviors and how this infrastructure will support these behaviors. He also said that there are two types of governance: what operates during design and what operates during run time as the transition to the new SOA services takes place and new complexities come up.
While the panel was not able to cover virtualization like we hoped in the hour, they did manage to cover other topics. The panel’s responses provide a rich resource on SOA Governance and make a good read (or listen). Here are the participants. They are left to right: Anne Thomas Manes, Ronald Schmelzer, Frank Martinez, David Bressler, John Michelsen, Ed Horst, and Joe McKendrick.
Thanks for the questions and comments, and those of you who stopped by our "virtual booth" for more questions. We're looking forward to our next one at the "SOA in Action" virtual conference Nov 19th 2008, which has a who's who of SOA experts throughout the day. John is participating in the "Avoiding SOA Disillusionment" panel at 2:00 PM Eastern with Joe and a new cast.
