SOA Governance: Achieving and Sustaining Business and IT Agility

Address the #1 Success Factor in SOA Implementations: Effective, Business-Driven Governance

Inadequate governance might be the most widespread root cause of SOA failure. In SOA Governance, a team of IBM’s leading SOA governance experts share hard-won best practices for governing IT in any service-oriented environment.

The authors begin by introducing a comprehensive SOA governance model that has worked in the field. They define what must be governed, identify key stakeholders, and review the relationship of SOA governance to existing governance bodies as well as governance frameworks like COBIT. Next, they walk you through SOA governance assessment and planning, identifying and fixing gaps, setting goals and objectives, and establishing workable roadmaps and governance deliverables. Finally, the authors detail the build-out of the SOA governance model with a case study.

The authors illuminate the unique issues associated with applying IT governance to a services model, including the challenges of compliance auditing when service behavior is inherently unpredictable. They also show why services governance requires a more organizational, business-centric focus than “conventional” IT governance.

Coverage includes

• Understanding the problems SOA governance needs to solve
• Establishing and governing service production lines that automate SOA development activities
• Identifying reusable elements of your existing IT governance model and prioritizing improvements 
• Establishing SOA authority chains, roles, responsibilities, policies, standards, mechanisms, procedures, and metrics
• Implementing service versioning and granularity
• Refining SOA governance frameworks to maintain their vitality as business and IT strategies change

Introduction: A Services Approach  

Chapter 1: Introduction to Governance   

Chapter 2: SOA Governance Assessment and Planning

Chapter 3: Building the Service Factory  

Chapter 4: Governing the Service Factory    

Chapter 5: Implementing the SOA Governance Model   

Chapter 6: Managing the Service Lifecycle    

Chapter 7: Governance Vitality     

Chapter 8: SOA Governance Case Study    

Appendix A: Glossary    

Appendix B: References    

Index  

William A. Brown is a Master Sr. Certified Executive IT Architect with IBM Global Business Services, Enterprise Architecture & Technology Center of Excellence, and the SOA Center of Excellence. He is the SOA Governance SGMM global lead and the lead author of IBM’s SOA Governance and Management Method (SGMM), SOA CoE Offering, white papers, presentation, and technique papers on SOA governance. Mr. Brown specializes in SOA governance and enterprise architecture, about which he continues to write articles, provide education, mentor, teach, present, develop assets, and deliver solutions to customers worldwide.

Robert G. Laird is an architect with IBM in the SOA Advanced Technologies group, performing worldwide consulting for IBM customers in the area of SOA governance, SOA architecture, and telco architecture. He has previously coauthored Executing SOA for Pearson Publishing, and has also written white papers and articles on SOA and SOA governance. He has more than 30 years of industry and consulting experience. Bob worked at MCI (a U.S. telco) as the chief architect, where he led the Enterprise Architecture group and the creation of an SOA-based single-stack strategy for multiple legacy applications and networks, and led automation projects in network management, provisioning, and restoration. He also consulted nationally for American Management Systems.

Clive Gee, Ph.D., one of IBM’s most experienced SOA governance practitioners, recently retired from his post as an Executive Consultant in the SOA Advanced Technologies group. He has worked in IT for more than 30 years, during the last few of which he led many SOA implementation and governance engagements for major clients all around the world, helping them to cope with the complexities of successfully transitioning to SOA. He now lives in Shetland, United Kingdom, but travels widely and does freelance consulting, especially in the area of SOA governance.

Tilak Mitra is a Senior Certified Executive IT Architect with IBM Global Business Services working very closely with the worldwide SOA Center of Excellence group in IBM. He specializes in SOAs, helping IBM in its business strategy and direction, fostering the maturity of SOA in the company. He also works as an SOA subject matter expert and architect, helping clients in their SOA-based business transformation, with a focus on complex and large-scale enterprise architectures. His current focus is on building SOA solutions for the chemicals and petroleum industry to optimize oil drilling and refinery processes. He has coauthored Executing SOA for Pearson Publishing, and has written several white papers and articles on SOA and SOA governance. He is a contributing editor of the Java Developers Journal (JDJ).