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Home > SOA governance: Reengineering IT governance |
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Guest Commentary
In today's tough business climate of heightened competition, complex regulations, and constant change, management must be able to set guidelines for their company, and then have sufficient visibility and control to ensure that people are following those guidelines. Information technology (IT) is at once the most important asset for providing this visibility and control to executive management, while at the same time impedes the very visibility and control IT promises to provide through the complexity, opacity, and inflexibility of the typical enterprise IT environment. It's no wonder, then, that IT governance is the most critical area of corporate governance in today's competitive enterprise -- both the governance of IT and the use of IT for corporatewide governance. However, how can executives rely upon brittle legacy IT infrastructures connected with spaghetti integration to offer the governance they require? The answer lies in architecture, because architecture provides the framework for the IT infrastructure and its use within the organization. Unfortunately, however, many organizations are struggling with their enterprise architecture, just as they are faced with IT governance challenges. Fortunately, there is hope on the horizon in the form of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA is an approach to enterprise architecture that abstracts IT functionality into business-oriented Services. The application of SOA to IT governance -- what we call SOA governance -- promises to provide the visibility and control necessary for IT governance, while increasing the business agility today's organizations require. Likewise, SOA provides an enterprise the ability to govern other aspects of their business as well. IT governance and enterprise architecture Enterprise architecture plays a key role in this process of delegating responsibility for IT resources and their integration. In essence, enterprise architecture encompasses both technical architecture (the organization of IT resources) as well as the business architecture. In order to succeed, enterprise architecture must reflect the needs of the organization and the fact that consensus must drive architecture definition and implementation. Architects, even if they are not involved in the development of business strategy, must at least have a fundamental understanding of the prevailing business issues facing the organization. It may even be necessary for architects to participate in the system deployment process and to ultimately own the investment and product selection decisions arising from the implementation of the architecture. As a result, the enterprise architect has an increasingly important role in the IT governance process. However, one challenge many organizations face is that the practice of enterprise architecture is still relatively immature. The role of enterprise architect is sometimes subsumed within product or project management roles, advanced developers, network administrators, or line-of-business users with a technical bent. Common roles for enterprise architects often include the definition of architectural taxonomies across business, application, and technical areas, the delivery of supporting knowledge and assets to consumers, and the governance of those assets within the scope of IT projects. However, such responsibilities vary from organization to organization. SOA governance The IT governance process begins with setting objectives for the enterprise's IT efforts. Traditional IT governance processes then distribute these objectives to each department within IT, for example, applications, networking, and IS. SOA governance, however, introduces the notion of domain ownership, where domains are managed sets of Services sharing some common business context. In many cases these sets of Services are business Services, such as customer information, order processing, or product analysis. Each domain is responsible for maintaining the applications that support its Services and for maintaining the interfaces to its Services for other domains. The owner of each domain must therefore handle such issues as Service management, business logic encapsulation, location independence, and the data format issues associated with its Services. When the people in charge of some product area want access to a Service from a domain, they make a request to the owners of the domain and the two groups determine the relationship between their respective spheres of influence, creating a Service-level agreement between them. Such relationships and agreements also exist between domains. SOA governance also introduces new roles that the company must provide for: Each person working within a given Service domain is responsible for developing the business Services that are shared across the lines of business. This shift in responsibility introduces a change in the organizational structure for application development, as people shift from developing functionality within an application to developing functionality within a particular Service domain. These new roles should work in conjunction with the enterprise architecture team. The ZapThink Take Furthermore, SOA requires a reorganization of IT personnel and the users of IT into domains. The need for governance highlights the importance of such reengineering, but is not its cause. On the contrary, the need to break down silos and organize a company's efforts based upon the core needs of the business is as old as the term "reengineering" suggests. SOA enables the enterprise to organize IT functionality into Services that meet the needs of the business, finally enabling companies to achieve the long-desired business goals of breaking down silos and focusing on the needs of the business and the customer. p> Copyright 2004. Originally published by ZapThink LLC, reprinted with permission. ZapThink LLC provides quality, high-value, focused research, analysis, and insight on emerging technologies that will have a high impact on the way business will be run in the future. To register for a free e-mail subscription to ZapFlash, click here. For more information:
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