SOA Governance@work

Could a 'not built here' attitude undermine the benefits that SOA has to offer?  Is the web 2.0 generation creating a new breed of developer that embraces reuse above all else?  These are tough questions that are difficult to answer.  Since the term reuse began rearing its head years ago, there's always been a bit of resistance to reusing code that someone else created.  In fact, lack of reuse is one of the leading causes for failing to realize the benefits SOA has to offer. 

It's not that organizations aren't building enough services, it's that organizations aren't encouraging the creation of enough reusable services. With SOA, we're not just asking developers to reuse code...we're asking them to utilize shared services in their applications that they have no power to modify.  That can be a little scary when you're used to having imminent domain over what you're creating. This fosters the 'not built here' mentality - the death sentence for reuse. 

'Not built here' isn't something unique to SOA.  It's a cultural issue.  I've even seen it prevail within the engineering departments of some of the software vendors I've worked for.  So how do you shift the culture so reuse is not just accepted, but desired?  How do you establish a level of trust that reusing a service will not negatively impact your service level agreement to the business?

To address the cultural aspects of reuse, try attempting to encourage the creation of reusable services.  Hold contests that reward teams for creating the most reusable/reused services or for utilizing the most reusable services within their applications.  This can foster friendly competition amongst your development teams that not only makes it fun and rewarding for developers, but benefits the business by encouraging reuse. 

There still needs to be a measure of trust, however.  To accomplish this, create a more formal provisioning process that provides a structured way for negotiating terms of usage for reusing a service.  Consumers and providers can negotiate contractual obligations, such as security entitlements and service level agreements, that guarantees the consumer a level of service provided and guarantees the provider the service will be utilized correctly.  This accomplishes two things: 1) it establishes a level of trust between the consumer and provider and 2) it creates potential new revenue streams for lines of businesses while reducing operating costs.

Let me address that second point.  When it comes to reuse, there tends to be an issue of burden of cost.  Should division A carry the burden of maintenance costs for a service that is being reused by division B?  Many times this can be what leads to discouragement of reuse.  Creating a charge back model as part of the provisioning process can help to alleviate this concern.

Division B, however, may be hesitant to pay a cross charge for use of a service it does not own.  However, analysis will show that the total cost of ownership is drastically reduced through reuse.  Take a typical cost of implementation and add maintenance costs over time.  Maintenance cost is an ongoing charge that can now be shared, saving you not only the implementation cost, but reducing the overall maintenance budget, freeing up funds to focus on new, value-added investments.  Even though division B is paying for reuse of the service, total cost of ownership is still lower then building it themselves.  While operational costs for division B are reduced, this also creates a potential new revenue stream for division A, especially if externalized in the form of cloud computing...but more on that later. 

So will fostering a culture of reuse magically make SOA successful?  No, not by itself, but it's important to consider, especially given the tangible and intangible benefits it can potentially provide. 

A SOA Governance survey report was recently released by ebizQ providing some insight into the state of the SOA Governance market.  There has been a lot of buzz over the last couple of years around this topic, so it's interesting to see what the industry's take is on SOA Governance: necessary for SOA success or over hyped? 

One interesting tidbit in the report is that a majority of those polled (50%) are still in the early phases of SOA.  This report doesn't have historical year over year trend data, but if we compare that to a similar study done by IDG last year, you can see that we're still at about the same level we were last year.  However, the number of enterprise scale deployments has gone up from 21% to 35%.  There's probably some mean error due to difference in surveys, but it's still a higher maturation rate then we've seen previously.  This supports the assumption that SOA is going mainstream at an increased rate. It'll be interesting to see what results show next year.

The survey goes on to query how important SOA governance is to organizations implementing SOA.  93% of respondents indicated governance was important to their SOA success (49% of those said SOA will fail without it).  Supporting this, 97% of those surveyed are either already down the governance path or are investigating it.  Now I'm a huge advocate of the need for SOA governance, but these numbers even surprised me.  Some say SOA governance is overhyped in the market, but apparently organizations are beginning to feel the need.  If these numbers hold true, we should see a significant uptake in SOA Governance over the next year, which in turn could boost that enterprise scale SOA percentage even higher. 

The survey goes on to address the drivers and challenges driving SOA governance and the importance of change management.  You can read the results for yourself in the report, but they indicate that a majority understand the importance of SOA Governance and the benefits it can derive. While this may seem unexciting, it's rather significant as it shows the maturation in thinking amongst those attempting SOA today.

The last part of the survey I think is pretty interesting shows that less then 15% of those surveyed feel your SOA Governance vendor of choice must provide an integrated SOA platform.  Why this is interesting is that it implies a preference of heterogeneity and best of breed.  Most organizations out there have a mixed bag of platforms and technologies that must be integrated and orchestrated within their SOA. Whatever tools you use for SOA Governance must provide support for heterogeneous assets without having to use vendor x for managing assets by vendor x and vendor y for managing assets by vendor y, with no correlation. 

Based on the results of this survey, this could make for an exciting year in the SOA world.  If these numbers are true, SOA governance will be a large focus for most organizations this year.  Most agree that SOA will fail without SOA governance, so could this be the year that SOA turns the corner?