Recently started the Oracle program: Are You The Smartest.
For me it is an opportunity to test my current knowledge level and to extend my knowledge.
After every session I follow, I will write a brief summary as part of the preparation for the test.
I will continue with the summary of the following session.

ARCHITECTS TRAINING – SERVICE INTEGRATION – Governance challenges in the services landscape

This 43 minutes during session was divided into the following parts:

• Challenges Solved with SOA Governance
• Oracle’s SOA Governance
• Customer Success Stories

Challenges Solved with SOA Governance

The reality: the benefits of SOA do not come automatically by implementing some webservices and a service bus.

They didn’t call it SOT for service oriented technology. They called it “Architecture” for a reason;

• It needs to be top-down vs. bottom-up
  • Think Big – Start Small
  • Bottom-up expresses the “how” not the “why”
• It needs to be aligned with the overall business architecture
• It’s not necessarily a project delivering an application

Lack of Governance Inhibits SOA Adoption

In traditional development you ‘know’ some important things like: budget, who’s responsible, who does what, who will use it, who will pay for it, … etc.
In SOA base development you do not know these things. Who hase to pay for using the service?, How are cost for usage calculated? …

SOA Governance definition

Governance, whether it is financial, business, legal or IT, is about getting people to do the right thing at the right time. In other words, it is about encouraging the behavior that will achieve your business goals

• SOA Governance provides the framework for planning, developing, deploying and managing the SOA environment
• Benefits:
  • Ensure alignment
  • Establish controls
  • Reduce cost over time
  • Mitigate risks

 SOA Governance in the Enterprise

SOA Governance – Why is it needed?

Without it …

• Service anarchy
  • Poor services, low-reuse, lots of the wrong services, perpetuation of silos
• Business Solutions fail to use Services
  • No promotion, no change in project delivery, no trust or confidence in services
• High cost of operations
  • No consistency “everyone’s doing their version of SOA”
  • Duplicated infrastructure, no standardisation
• No measured benefit
  • No visibility of SOA Benefits

What Decisions must be Governed and Made ?

• Which services to do ?
• Which services to do first?
• Is this really a new, reusable service ?
• Who is going to pay for development and maintenance of this service?
• Who owns this service?

• What decisions needs to made for your organization to have effective SOA Governance?
• Who should make these decisions?
• How will these decisions be made and monitored?
• What Structures, Process, Communication, Tools should be deployed

These are all aspects which can be answered and managed with a SOA Governance

Oracle’s SOA Governance (Model , Enabling Technologies)

The right people do the right thing / have the right view

Governance and SOA Maturity must be in sink with each other (same level).

SOA Governance Model constituent parts…

Service Lifecycle Governance <> SOA Governance

Political/Organizational Aspects of SOA Governance Influencing SOA Behavior Mandate AND Authority

• Mandate AND Authority
  • Structures must be empowered to make and enforce decisions
• SOA Organisation (if appropriate update existing structures)
  • Structure with a broad set of SOA strategy, architecture and implementation skills to enable and support project delivery teams
  • Not a mass IT reorganisation
• Education for all
• Specific Roles in the governance model
• Opportunities for the individual; incentives for key actors

Empowered Structures

SOA Steering Board

• Executive Sponsorship
• Set business priority – enable alignment
• Vision & Strategy
• Establish funding models
• Exeption Management

SOA Architecture Authority / Competence Center

• Strategy Execution
• Reference Architecture Authority
• SOA Skills & Resource Base
• Adjudicates architectural priorities ans issues
• Enterprise Modeling for Service Architectures
• Service Engineering Framework Compliance & Governance
• Core team supplemented by all project architects

SOA Enablement Team / COE

• Enables corporate competency development
• Compliance Assurance
• Project Enablement

Software Factory

• Service Engineers

SOA Governance: Tools and Infrastructure

• Single source of truth for SOA portfolio
• Provide dependency tracking and impact analysis, tracks usage and compliance for visibility into ROI
• Ensures policy compliance throughout the lifecycle and enforcement across the SOA infrastructure
• Monitors, diagnoses and ensures service levels
• Surfaces metrics and analytics for decision support

Full lifecycle support. Starting from plan to execution and monitoring.

Customer Success Stories

Wachovia Investment Banking

O2

Challenges

• Like many companies, O2 found itself developing the same technical functions many times.
• Inefficiency in OPEX and CAPEX expenditure
• Longer time to market
• A complex IT architecture
• Untenable Development and maintenance of HW and SW for point solutions

Critical Success Factors & Lesson Learned

• From the outset, O2 recognized the importance of strong SOA governance and communication.
• Followed best practices in establishing architecture and service management capabilities.
• Use of the Service Factory concept for shared services.
• Establish a clear governance framework
• While you design a service in the context of a given project, try to understand if it would make sense in the context of other projects and develop it to support as many other requirements as possible
• It takes time to build a service portfolio.
• Maintain enthusiasm for the SOA approach by getting projects to deliver. Communicate and demostrate business value.

AETON

Mission Statement

• Implement a governance framework that will guide our organization as it deploys a service-oriented operating model by developing an SOA governance roadmap that focuses on delivering the greatest value to Eaton.
• Eaton’s SOA governance model specifies the processes, policies, controls and governance mechanisms that ensure compliance within the Service Oriented Architecture.
• It additionally provides the organizational structure and defines the roles and responsibilities that are needed to operate this governance model.

Boards/Committees
The SOA Governance function will be a 3-tier structure consisting of:

• SOA Steering Commitee
  • Provides guidance and direction to the SOA governance boards.
• SOA Strategy Board
  • Establishes SOA-related stategies and roadmaps
  • Establishes SOA-related policies and guidelines
• SOA Tactical Governance Board
  • Reviews the compliance of SOA-related artifacts created by the SOA development communities within Eaton to the strategies, policies, and guidelines created by the SOA Strategy Board
  • OER/OSR- oriented

Oracle Enterprise Repository is the glue between the individual parts.

Recap & Suggestions

• SOA Governance is a process and not a project, therefore measure progress and course-correct when needed
• SOA Governance requires processes, people and technology
• Incrementally Adopt a SOA Governance Model
  • Build a 2 – 3 year SOA Governance vision and deploy incrementally
  • SOA Governance Structures must have appropriate level of authority to make and enforce decisions
  • It’s all about TRUST and COMMUNICATION
• Understand the Governance Consequences – Pain Now or Pain Later