Occasionally, technologies emerge that are true catalysts for a change. These changes can be so fundamental that they re-define how things are done from that point forward, not just in the context of the technology that introduced them but across all of IT. Think of what the Internet is teaching us about privacy or what blogs and Twitter are teaching us about the immediacy of information.
The adoption of Service-Oriented Architecture is such a change agent impacting IT today. It has introduced a fundamental shift in IT approach and culture. Why? For years, IT has avoided dependency and SOA is all about embracing dependencies – encouraging re-use for agility. This new world, emerging from the adoption of SOA, of shared services and re-use instead of build from scratch, is fundamentally driving IT to put in place governance across the lifecycle of services and applications. Governance did not come about because of SOA, but successful SOA adoption demands it. This blog is first of a series I will share on “what we are learning from SOA”. Let’s get a lively dialog going on this subject. I’ll kick it off by asking “do you see the importance of governance across all applications, not just SOA?”
IMO, governance is a necessary and powerful aspect of successfully managing the lifecycle of anything that IT delivers to meet the goals of the business. As IT leaders strive to create an IT organization that will be considered agile—and surpass business expectations, they are finding that their existing silos of applications must rapidly evolve to become more modular, more transparent, more self-describing. These application capabilities must become exposed as shared services for rapid, continuous and un-planned consumption to continue to meet ever-changing business demands. A shared service nirvana supporting quick assembly of new applications is great when it comes to rapid response to business process change, but should send chills through IT’s spine from a management and control perspective.
The way to get a handle on these flexible, ready-to-assemble and “mash-up” application services is to deliver them in a safe, planned and policy-guided environment. IT must get ahead of the wild-west of highly distributed systems by establishing polices and mechanisms to ensure application services get planned, built, tested and delivered in ways that align with expectations; expectations about how they are going to be used, how they will be changed, how they stay interoperable and how they will continue to meet the on-going demands of the business. And, when this is done well, it doesn’t matter who delivers the services – internal or even out in the cloud.
This is application governance. To date, much of what has been said and promoted about governance in relation to the modernization of systems has been in the context of SOA and in that context, governance adds much value to SOA-based projects—guiding IT to drive the transition, consistency and ultimately success of the SOA effort. But, governance also adds a great deal of value to web projects, portal projects, business process orchestration, mash-ups, situational apps and especially to cloud-based applications (see podcast and blog from HP and Cap Gemini on this subject here) where the implications of service delivery go well beyond a single IT domain. So, what came first, the chicken or the egg… what came first: SOA or governance? Certainly governance came first. Application and architectural governance will continue to add value to SOA and transcend SOA. It is one of the best mechanisms to inspire and drive the kind of change IT needs to successfully develop an agile and dependable architecture. Thoughts?
Posted
01-27-2009 10:06 PM
by
kellyemo