2008-06-14

2008-06-14 SOA Governance vs. Business Agility

Recently I've been doing some heavy research on SOA technology, best practices, design patterns, etc.

It seems to me that there is an inherent conflict between what some pundits claim are essential practices for SOA Governance - and the core business driver of organizational agility.

Forcing every service through a Governance Committee Review process - before it can be deployed to production - is probably one draconian extreme.

Allowing any application development team to publish any service end-point without being vetted is probably the other extreme.

The level of maturity (or lack thereof) of the Registry/Repository products that I have reviewed is laughable. I would sincerely like to know of one single organization that has actually implemented non-trivial SOA Governance policies in their Registry/Repository mechanism - using the features provide by a vendor's core product capabilities.

Whether you do a Top-Down SOA design, a Bottom-Up, or work up/down from the middle, it seems to me that you are going to have pain. Either as a product of the upfront analysis effort (causing delays before your SOA efforts produce any measurable ROI), or as a product of the chaos created by hordes of poorly designed services sprouting like wild flowers across the enterprise.

Draconion SOA Governance processes may mitigate some of the pain - but at the cost of organizational agility.

The Noble Truth of Suffering is this: Birth is suffering, ageing is suffering, sickness is suffering, death is suffering; sorrows and lamentation, pain, grief and despair are suffering; association with the unpleasant is suffering, dissociation from the pleasant is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering – in short, the five aggregates of attachment are suffering.
Pali Tripitaka, Buddhist collection of sacred texts, Sutta-Nipata
(source)


In harmony with my natural tendency to follow Buddhist and Taoist practices, I have chosen to lead my current SOA project down the middle path. We will embrace business agility as a First Principle, and leverage a custom-built SOA Governance Metrics Reporting subsystem to help us monitor the usage of services across the enterprise.

2008-06-14 Links


Joel Spolky's Architecture astronauts take over posting. Good reading.

Need to Scale Fast? Just Re-Architect it!

Are SOA Centers of Excellence Necessary?

Wall Street becoming Linux stronghold

Understanding Amazon Web Services

Was eBay a fad?

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

2008-06-12

2008-06-12 Thursday

Agile 2008 Program Announced (Toronto, August 4-8, 2008)

Interview: Randy Shoup Discusses the eBay Architecture

Does My Bus Look Big in This?
"In this presentation, recorded at QCon London 2008, ThoughtWorks' Chief Scientist Martin Fowler and Global Head of Architecture Jim Webber share their views of the typical corporate ESB, which in their view has grown too fat for its own good. Martin and Jim suggest the Web's architecture as a possible and more light-weight alternative, in line with their preference for agile approaches."


QCon San Francisco Nov 19-21 Enterprise Software Development Conference Launched

Presentation: Agile Architecture Is Not Fragile Architecture
"Architecture is perceived as a heavy-weight activity which does not fit into an Agile process, so many teams start without it, just to find themselves re-doing the software later because the code structure was not good enough to support maintainability and evolution. In this presentation, Coplien and Henney describe how to start with enough architecture to ensure long term success of the project."


CIA explains its Wikipedia-like national security project

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