While
most of the enterprises are mastering the art of SOA compliance, and
some of the enterprises which are in early stages of adoption
realizing the ROI and the way it is impacting their Business
bottom line. Well its a positive direction in which enterprise
business is growing by leveraging SOA Foundation principles, but to
what degree of SOA Governance models are adopted in practice is still
a question & its a key factor to measure successful SOA
Transformation. Moreover the SOA Tools that these enterprises are
using drives the SOA adoption for enterprises. In this blog I
would like to discuss "SOA Governance & its importance"
which I personally feel as neglected aspect of SOA in most
enterprises. Also I would like to define some of the best practices
of SOA Governance.

Defined
-

Governance:
Governance is an act of dealing, observing, controlling a System
execution & evolution (with actors/people, process/procedures) by
protecting long term strategies to achieve Goals.

SOA
Governance – Its a software IT management practice in which various
individual governing policies viz., “Architectural governance
policies,, Service design, creation, life-cycle governance policies”
can be defined and enforced and acts like crux of IT Governance to
deliver a better IT management.

Why SOA governance is important

A proper SOA governance facilitates enterprises to
create more re-usable business service components across various
other individual business units. The major intricacy here is “creation
of a software service which is usable across
enterprise/organization”. Remember that in typical enterprise
business each individual business unit can have several tens of
applications running, and for these applications to work with newly
created services is not straight forward unless the new Creation
happens with certain standards, certain interoperable rules &
regulations. The complexity here is not the existing applications
which are deployed and making the business to run, but it lies in how
new services are getting created and what are the standards that
services are offering to be 100% interoperable & reusable.

Once a service is created and comes into existence the
next biggest challenge is how to enforce that these services are not
duplicated across business organizations. Considering the size of
bigger enterprises and the way in which they communicate with each
other – unless individual business units works with a governance
body which takes care of defining standards, enforces policies for
not promoting duplicate redundant services.

The need of SOA governance is limited at a creation
level but it can be spanned at several other service management
life cycle aspects viz,. Service registry, service delivery, service
change management during deployment, service standards
interoperability, service compliance at business level. It is highly
required for enterprises to enforce governing policies around each and
every aspect of service life cycle as mentioned above. The best way
of enforcing is by comparing all incumbent services, existing
services against a standards checklist at each phase of service
life cycle management. Here is a snapshot of where SOA Governance
can play a role

> Service Incubation: The process in which a
functional requirement can be identified as a “Enterprise level
business service” than at an application level service.

> Service Architecture & Design:
Principles used to definite the architecture, design to ensure
services will fit to run at an enterprise level to be in compliance.

> Service Publishing, Interoperability,
Accessibility – The mechanism through which enterprise can
publish services for readiness, technology choices to make them
interoperable, provide rules of accessibility along with service
delivery, security definitions.

Unless enterprises stipulates required regulations around
above said areas it is very difficult to bring the predictability of
service behavior to be managed at IT teams. An enterprise is
successful on SOA foundation only when it creates and deploys more
and more reusable software services with minimal requirements to
customize, providing maximum benefit from the standards it supports,
level of interoperability it offers and business compliances it
achieves. Simply making a fragile SOA applications across business
functional areas with technology integration compliance is not enough
to get the maximum ROI from SOA, in order to get the maximum ROI
from SOA enterprises imperatively adopt SOA Governance policies, SOA
Govering solutions facilitating policy enforcement and management.

  Best Practices

• Create SOA Governance dedicated team which can function
  as a subset of IT Policy management team.

• Define Governing principles in enterprises SDLC policy,
  this is very useful for technology teams to understand the bigger
  expectations of services being developed and deployed.

• Compose a service with emphasis on separating
  Operations/functionality of service with manageability,administration
  by providing Standards based meta-data about services.

• Understand the need of having a specific function of
  business to be demarcated as SOA Level reusable service component
  accessible across other applications. Simply do not demarcate all
  functions as services just for the sake of it. Unless a business
  function is well qualified with justification one should not develop
  and manage functions as SOA services.

•  
  Separate Governance policies for Development,
  Publishing and management of services. This will help to federate
  governing policies and enforce them with different teams responsible
  for service development, deployment and using.