Recent Posts by Bob Rhubart

In SOA Spending Up, So Where is the Value?, Dave Linthicum makes an interesting point about the value of reuse in the overall SOA picture:  The core issue is that reuse, as a notion, is not core to the value of SOA…never has, never will. Not that you won't achieve reuse, and that there is benefit, but that the value of agility, or creating an architecture that's changeable around the needs of the business is far more valuable than any services you can share. Dave's post drew...

In yesterday's post I mentioned experiencing some confusion about a point David Linthicum made in his post Too Much Focus on SOA Governance…Not Enough on Architecture. In a post today, David offers this clarification: SOA governance is indeed a part of SOA, just as governance is a part of enterprise architecture. In my way of thinking I'm really morphing all of those things together, in essence defining SOA as architecture, and architecture as holistic to the enterprise. SOA...

Thanks to a post by Joe McKendrick, InfoWorld blogger David Linthicum picked up on my recent post about an informal survey we conducted at an industry event late last year. In his post, David suggests that there is too much focus on SOA governance and not enough on architecture. He offers this comment: The clear path that most are taking is to build the services, and then layer in the SOA governance technology without a clear understanding of what they will do with those...

Part of the SOA Governance @ Work series Writing in Wanted: new term for SOA ‘governance’, Joe McKendrick continues a blogosphere conversation about labeling SOA governance, and about the balance between SOA governance and agility. (See the posts by  David Linthicum, Michael Meehan, Dan Foody, and Todd Biske.) Joe says: I’ve even heard of cases where SOA governance itself has tended to go too far, strangling the innovation that service orientation and loose coupling is...

In  a recent post Todd Biske offers some clear thinking on the perception of SOA governance as agility-killing oppression: I won’t argue that most people have a very negative reaction to the term, but there’s a key point that missing in the discussion. Governance is about the people, policies, and processes put in place to obtain desired behaviors. Governance does not have to be about command and control. If your desired behavior is complete freedom to try anything and...

In his Real World SOA post, Defining SOA Governance, Dave Linthicum observes that within the broader topic of SOA governance, "there are really two flavors emerging: Design time and runtime." "It's important to understand the differences," Dave writes, "and that you may indeed need two SOA governance products, at the end of the day." Flavors of SOA governance? It's an interesting observation, and more than a little scary. The implication is that design time and runtime are...

Part of the SOA Governance @ Work Series Late last year, at an SOA-oriented IT industry event held in Las Vegas, visitors to the BEA booth were asked to fill out a short survey on how their respective companies address SOA governance.  While thoroughly unscientific, this informal survey offered a glimpse into: What's happening with SOA Governance out in the real world, and... What happens to the already horrible handwriting of IT people when they are in a city that, by law,...

Part of the SOA Governance @ Work series A significant part of getting your SOA to do what it's supposed to do is getting the people involved in the SOA to do what they're supposed to do. While you're thinking about that, consider that "Don't Tase me, bro!"  was recently named the most memorable phrase of 2007. Coincidence? You be the judge. Anyway... In our last installment we looked at incentives and their role in getting people to get with the SOA program.  Developing the...

Part of the SOA Governance @ Work series While noodling around the A2A blogs I found this bit of wisdom quoted in one of Steve Bennett's old posts: “Hope is not a viable SOA strategy.” I don't know the original source of that quote, but it's worth printing on a t-shirt, or maybe a tattoo.  Because in order to make SOA work, hope will get you only so far. You need governance, and any good SOA governance program has to include effective incentives. The term "SOA governance" covers...