Recent Posts by Bob Rhubart

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...

Part of the SOA Governance@Work series In our last episode we took a look at how policies relate to various aspects of SOA. In this episode we'll peel the policy onion a bit more to look at what policies are and what they do. The Wikipedia definition for the word "policy" includes this concise nugget: "[A] deliberate plan of action to guide decisions and achieve rational outcome(s)."  The rational outcome for SOA is, of course, an infrastructure that supports seamless business/IT...

Part of the SOA Governance@Work series Conventional wisdom holds that there is a lot of confusion about SOA. I can’t understand why -- I googled “What is SOA?” and found more than 27,000 definitions. I also googled “What is truth?” and found 333,000 definitions, which puts the whole SOA thing into perspective. But let’s ignore, for a moment, the definition of what SOA is to look at what SOA is supposed to do. After all, this series of posts is dedicated to an examination of...

The first installment in the SOA Governance@Work series SOA governance is a big deal, truly important stuff. It covers lots of territory and involves lots of people taking lots of aspirin. Get it right, and your SOA initiative has a far greater chance of success. Get it wrong, and it won't be very long before Moose and Knuckles from building security help you move your stuff to your new office on the sidewalk near the bus stop. But SOA governance isn't a monolithic issue. Like...