| |
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
Process to Perfection – Great Wine and SOA Governance
Elias Karthan, Director of Architecture Services and
Brad Bukacek, SOA Developer
Governance is to your organization what the wine making process is to a winery. Both require specific tools, standardized processes, best practices, and knowledgeable resources. With SOA governance getting plenty of airwaves of late, we wanted to offer some insight as to just what SOA governance is. Remember though, just as the processes differ for making each type of wine, SOA governance will differ for each organization.
Look it up online and you’ll find that governance in general has to do with making decisions that define expectations, grant power, or verify performance. When applied to Information Technology projects it’s safe to say that most organizations have some form of governance already in place. There are processes to:
• Prioritize projects.
• Define how projects are implemented.
• Monitor solutions after they have been deployed to ensure systems behave appropriately.
Similar to what most organizations are already doing with projects, SOA governance focuses on managing services and a Service Oriented Architecture, and can be viewed as the combination of people, policies, processes, and technology used to support an organization’s SOA objectives. It’s all about establishing control over an environment and addresses:
• What services should be built.
• How services should be built (what’s the right way).
• Understanding what services have been built and how to use them.
• How to ensure that services are working/behaving appropriately.
SOA governance becomes important because SOA creates a more abstract and distributed environment and is more complex than traditional integration approaches. The trick to successful SOA governance is to properly define it within the context of a given organization’s culture. If the governance implementation does not adhere to organizational culture, employees may write off the governance policies as extraneous and not mission critical, thus greatly limiting your chance of success. As with any change, remember to start small. Many companies make the mistake of defining and implementing too much governance all at once. It’s important to remember that SOA Governance is implemented iteratively and should be continually revisited and refined.
Some Tips
Just as successful wineries need the right people, processes and technology, so too does your SOA governance implementation.
PEOPLE
Wineries don’t hire people off the street to tell them when to harvest their grapes. That just wouldn’t make sense. When implementing a SOA governance model you’ll want to carefully create the team to lead the implementation. To be successful, you should consider:
• Having employees with organizational authority drive the SOA governance model, indicating which services to build and how to build those services. This group of people will be tasked with creating the governance vision and strategy.
• Ensuring IT employees have the required skills to build service-oriented applications.
• Building an on-going governance team that addresses the maturing SOA governance model within the organization. You might include enterprise architects, business executives who provided strategy and vision, and possibly SOA developers.
PROCESSES
Having the right people will put you on the path to success, but just as wineries follow specific processes when making wine, your governance must include specific processes, polices, and standards that:
• Prevent duplication of efforts, and increase reuse;
• Reduce diversity in method and services, and increase adherence to specific standards and best practices.
• Promote the successful communication of strategy, vision, policies, which increase buy in and adherence to the SOA governance.
TECHNOLOGY
Lastly, just as wineries don’t ferment wine in leftover plastic milk jugs, in order to successfully implement your governance, you’ll need to make use of the right tools. To implement SOA governance, you need products that provide a means to design, build, manage and control a SOA ecosystem. Products that will deliver a way to maximize service use, analyze changes and monitor performance.
Tools, such as Oracle Enterprise Repository or Oracle Service Registry, provide a great place to start implementing a governance model because they help you visualize what services exist in your SOA ecosystem. Additionally, Oracle Web Services Manager help execute governance by enforcing security policies throughout a SOA, and Oracle Enterprise Management Pack for SOA will monitor performance of those services. Oracle’s SOA Suite provides all the tools needed to control a service lifecycle.
If it wasn’t already obvious, we admit that we’re not master wine makers or grape growers, but we are glad to share our enterprise architecture expertise. From assisting you with your SOA governance implementation to helping you build the services you need, Zirous can assist you with all your SOA-related tasks.
To learn more about Oracle SOA technologies, visit Oracle’s SOA website.
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
|
