"Without solid architecture and governance in place SOA is basically a waste of time."
James Governor, Principal Analyst, Redmonk
If poorly governed, an SOA initiative can become just another stovepipe application. SOA governance is what enables diverse business units and IT stakeholders to ensure that development activities and goals are properly aligned so the SOA they collectively create is truly cross-enterprise. SOA governance is all about the policies, the procedures, the control points and the decision rights that allow an effective process to be put in place to best leverage your SOA investments.
Once the governance framework has been established, the focus shifts to executing the process and monitoring the results. In many organizations, the people who are delivering services are in different buildings, countries and time zones. They can even be in different companies when work is outsourced or performed by business partners. In such distributed development environments, it’s vital that the established SOA governance policies guide management of activities throughout the service lifecycle.
With IBM Rational® service lifecycle management solutions, you can automate enforcement of your SOA governance model. As depicted in the graphic below, you’re able to embed established procedures, controls and decision rights into the processes that manage your lifecycle of service assets and resources.
The IBM solution is a comprehensive family of products that bridges technologies, functions, geographies and development environments. Capabilities include process and portfolio management, change and release management, quality management, and architecture management. Players at every step of software and systems delivery—from the business analysts to the architects to the developers to the testers to the operations team—are able to validate that the services and composite applications they are modeling, assembling, deploying and managing are aligned with the stated business needs of the enterprise. For example, a governance requirement like, We want order entry to take no more than five minutes, might lead to management metrics like, The system must respond to input X in 100 milliseconds or less.
It is important to note that the SOA governance framework is not static. Feedback from service lifecycle management helps you refine SOA governance policies and procedures for continual process improvement.
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