SOA Governance: Balancing Process and Agility
By now everybody has heard over and over how governance is critical to the success of any SOA Implementation. Companies implementing SOA must provide the proper level of governance required to achieve reuse and flexibility without negatively impacting their team's ability to innovate and be agile.
Too much process stifles innovation and deters agility
On the flip side of the coin are the shops that believe in process for the sake of process. They create so much process that the team gets bogged down in documentation and loses sight of the business drivers. I have seen people break down services that are so fine grained they provide little or no value and never become reused. Often, "overkill governance" or "death by process" models make the architects think like robots and simply perform whatever the documents or checklists tell them to do. Then there are the long review processes that take weeks to approve things that should take a day or two. Reasons for this type of model are:
Viewing SOA as a technology problem instead of a business enabler
Lack of trust and empowerment for architects and leads
Process heavy culture used to long delivery cycles
Lack of technical and business expertise in the leadership ranks
Finding the right balance
Every company culture and every SOA initiative is unique. There is no silver bullet or one size fits all governance model. Stack vendors, SOA implementation consulting firms and standards bodies all have well-documented methodologies for SOA governance. Pick one that best matches your culture and customize it to your company's needs.
So how can we be agile and enforce SOA governance at the same time? One way is to shift from text heavy documentation to visual documentation. In other words, stop generating hundred-page Word documents and start creating UML models, business process models, use case diagrams and architecture diagrams. These artifacts are like blueprints for a building architect. If you were building your dream house, would you type up the specs for your house in a Word document and hand it to your builder—or would you give her blueprints? My motto has always been "focus on artifacts that add value and discard everything else." Don't make your staff perform steps that serve no purpose other than to satisfy a checklist. SOA governance should not be created by project managers; it is the architects that need to define it. It is all about service life cycle management and the standard n-tier processes do not apply.
