Surfing Change through Enterprise SOA Governance
By Krishna Kumar
Mumbai, Mar 19, 2008

Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) helps businesses respond more quickly and cost effectively to changing market conditions. It is a business-driven software architecture that allows you to share and reuse services within your company and with strategic partners.

Going a step further, enterprise SOA governance is an all-encompassing application framework that acts as a force multiplier. This is particularly relevant in a scenario of inorganic growth where multiple legacy systems need to be quickly pulled together and orchestrated to grow further.

The term 'enterprise SOA governance' refers to the processes, policies and associated control mechanism a company establishes in order to steer the adoption, implementation and evolution of SOA in line with business needs. These governance principles provide SOA initiatives with structure and control, resulting in the reusability of enterprise services.

SOA governance is the process of aligning enterprise services across industry standards.

Governance ensures consistency, harmonization of semantics, and reuse across all solutions. It differentiates plain "vanilla" web services from enterprise services.

Consistently successful enterprise SOA calls for a holistic and evolutionary governance approach that encompasses people, processes, and technologies. Enterprise SOA initiatives that rely on a tool-based governance approach alone will inevitably be limited in scope. To ensure the benefits of enterprise SOA are achieved, governance must expand beyond the core strategic alignment between business and IT. Enterprise SOA governance embraces processes, guidelines, and procedures that need to be systematically developed and matured.

Effective enterprise SOA governance calls for a holistic management approach that integrates and aligns the corporate business strategy, the IT strategy, and the planning and operational activities associated with enterprise SOA solutions.

In most companies, some elements of enterprise SOA governance already exist. For instance, you can leverage IT governance as part of the foundation for enterprise SOA governance. But enterprise SOA governance is much more; it involves organizational structures, skills, and procedures aligned with business needs. Competency and control ensure that enterprise SOA delivers sustained benefits.

Enterprise SOA implementations call for a well-managed approach to organizational planning and transformation. The art is to identify and prioritize the gaps on the road to enterprise SOA without reinventing the wheel. IT and business organizations jointly define and establish new processes, ranging from business requirement translations and process definitions to enterprise service development and the ongoing adoption of enterprise SOA solutions. The staff members need to develop new skills so that they can fulfill new roles within the framework of the company's culture. When people understand their roles in designing and implementing enterprise SOA solutions, they understand the business usage of enterprise SOA applications.

Principles for sound decision making as well as robust escalation procedures need to be in place. The paradigm shift from an application centric approach to a process centric approach drives the need to understand business processes in detail and its underlying business events.

Enterprise SOA changes the way in which business and IT deal with each other. The change in mindsets is significant. The IT organization needs to thoroughly understand business requirements, become more responsive to business needs and speak the language of business; business organizations need to clearly communicate what they need and are prepared to pay for so that the IT organization can provide the underlying architecture required to deliver and maintain services with business-level meanings.

This mutual understanding is the key to the design, development, use, and reuse of enterprise services that are synchronized with business needs. Effective enterprise SOA governance is the key to creating this understanding. An enterprise SOA competency center serves as the nucleus that drives this understanding.

Business-driven enterprise SOA is based upon a clear understanding of business strategy and objectives. Business processes need to be defined and engineered based upon this understanding. This approach determines which enterprise services are appropriate for a particular business process, which services are ready for reuse, and which need to be newly developed, and the appropriate enterprise service granularity.

The ultimate objectives of enterprise SOA are to enhance responsiveness to change in the business and IT arenas and to accelerate project delivery. The enterprise SOA competency center provides the prerequisite skills, expertise, and guidance, taking a holistic approach that mitigates risks and yields services that can easily be tailored and combined to support and facilitate business processes, such as setting up a new customer or processing a supplier invoice.

The benefits of enterprise SOA are compelling: increased strategic agility for the business and major productivity gains for IT. But the prerequisite for these benefits is a high degree of governance automation - both at design-time and runtime. You can achieve this by using enterprise SOA governance and supportive life-cycle management tools that span all phases of the enterprise service life cycle. Automated governance tools help to ensure compliance with proven design principles and support the reuse of enterprise services.

Community building has proven its worth to enterprise SOA initiatives. The global enterprise SOA community produces value based upon the open exchange of ideas. For enterprise SOA, idea sharing needs to be done with focus on co-invention to advance enterprise services, the underlying enterprise SOA, and associated governance.

Sharing best practices in enterprise service communities helps to facilitate tasks such as service abstraction and harmonization. Enterprise communities help companies to considerably reduce development effort by sharing expertise in the use of standardized services or by exchanging purpose-built services.

SOA has transcendental value. The true gains of SOA reflect in the growing productive efficiencies of the organizations worldwide. Enterprise Service Oriented architecture not only guarantees process integrity with extended flexibility for end users, but also helps in a community development of the software ecosystem.