What is SOA governance?
SOA governance is an extension of IT governance that focuses on the lifecycle of services and composite applications in an organization’s service-oriented architecture (SOA). The function of SOA governance is to define:
- Decision rights for the development, deployment and management of new services.
- Monitoring and reporting processes for capturing and communicating governance results. Because SOA applications are intrinsically fragmented, they introduce new governance challenges. But with the proper policies, principles, standards, procedures and processes in place, businesses can realize the full benefit of service orientation. An effective SOA governance platform not only helps business and IT teams better identify which projects contribute most to business goals, but it also empowers employees to work and collaborate more efficiently by clearly defining their roles and responsibilities.
- SOA Governance definition podcasts
What is service lifecycle management?
Once the SOA governance framework is implemented, it will be used in the model, assemble, deploy and manage phases within the SOA lifecycle. Related to the operational aspects of implementing SOA governance, service lifecycle management addresses how services will be developed, deployed and managed.
Service lifecycle management focuses on the development and deployment of services. SOA governance supplies the decision rights, processes and policies for those activities. Once a service is deployed, there must be management aspects in place to control and monitor the service.
Within service lifecycle management there is a set of functions that will need to be in place and governed to ensure that the value proposition of SOA, particularly reuse and cost reduction, is achieved.
For more information on how to advance your SOA governance procedures, visit: ibm.com/software/solutions/soa/entrypoints/advancing_soa_governance.html
In order to effectively govern the service lifecycle from development through deployment, a scalable, flexible enterprise level solution is required that includes:
- Repository to store, catalog and flexibly organize individual services.
- Customizable workflow to automate the process of managing the service lifecycle.
- Flexible solution for capturing relationships between services and impact analysis.
- Ability to report on key metrics to support planning and assessment.
- Solution that is integrates with your with your SOA design and runtime systems including other existing repositories.
IBM provides combined, integrated design-time and run-time SOA repositories to govern the service lifecycle from creation to consumption. This capability is powered by IBM Rational Asset Manager that manages information that is useful for developing, re-using and managing all types of reusable assets and IBM WebSphere Service Registry and Repository that manages information that is useful for the runtime operation, management and development use of services.
The increased flexibility and cross-organizational nature of business services that SOA facilitates, requires that organizations establish a framework to implement active decision-making, accurate tracking, improved serviceability and better communication.
SOA governance is the mechanism to ensure that the decision making structure is solid, relationships between services and parties are managed and that there is compliance with the laws, policies, standards and procedures under which an organization operates.
Specifically SOA governance
- Creates higher return from focused SOA investments
- Aligns IT and business strategies, creates communication paths
- Reduces coordination costs: less time wasted due to poorly-managed conflicts
- Institutes efficient and effective decision making and clarity executing roles and accountability
- Measures effectiveness of SOA
An enterprise that fails to realize the importance of an effective governance structure may not stand to benefit much from a SOA transition.
|
