Ken,
That would be awesome and a great resource to mine for our
work. Please, by all means, go for it! And please extend our appreciation to
your wife.
As to eBay, that is also a good point. I have a contact
point for one of the Enterprise Architects at eBay, I’ll ping him to see
if I can get him or someone from his org engaged.
All,
If there is enough interest on the part of both parties,
would it be appropriate to invite him/her to, say a 20 minute presentation
followed by a Q&A during one of our regular weekly telcons?
Regards,
- Anil
From: Ken Laskey
[mailto:]
Sent: Tuesday, January 02, 2007 11:55 PM
To: John, Anil
Cc:
Subject: Re: [soa-rm-ra] SOA Governance Discussion Strawman per the last
F2F
Anil,
Good capture of the discussion.
Here's something else to consider for additional
resources. My wife is a professor in the Systems Engineering and
Operations Research department at George Mason University. I've shown her
some of our governance discussions and she mentioned the evolving governance of
eBay as something more like SOA than many of the traditional corporate
models. It probably bears some additional investigation. That
brings me to the resources. My wife is running a Masters project class
this coming semester and is looking for prospective projects from which her
students could choose. She thinks researching and possibly proposing
ideas for SOA governance could be an attractive topic. We'd need a
10-minute problem description for January 22, and I could present it to save you
the commute. What do you think?
Ken
On Jan 2, 2007, at 10:55 PM, John, Anil wrote:
All,
I wanted
to put together a synopsis/strawman of the governance discussion that we had at
the last face to face. At the same time, we had also discussed at the F2F that
we needed to get wider community participation and input into this work. To
that end, I put that strawman into a public blog entry (Just as a point of
order, I requested and was granted permission to blog about the work by Frank
at the F2F); Oh yes, this was also an excuse to use my casual writing style -
I'll defer the formal writings to Ken and Jeff :-)
Here are
the relevant bits:
SOA
& GOVERNANCE
The starting point of the
discussion was the definition of SOA as defined in the SOA-RM
which states that "Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a
paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may
be under the control of different ownership domains."
But when we speak of
traditional IT governance, it usually means governance applied within the
Enterprise; within a single ownership domain if you will. But in the case of a
SOA implementation it needs to be applied across ownership domains, across
Enterprises. And that requires a different set of carrots and sticks, perhaps
something much more contractual in nature rather than
something direct. And that in turn brings to light the fact that what
one organization considers governance will be completely different from what
another organization considers governance.
At this point, I proposed
a definition of governance that is consistent with the above and has resonated
very well with me. Requiring no original thought on my part,
I quoted Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton Group who has
said “Governance refers to the processes that an enterprise puts in
place to ensure that things are done right, where "right" means in
accordance with best practices, architectural principles, government
regulations, laws, and other determining factors. SOA governance refers to the
processes used to govern adoption and implementation of SOA.” With
the exception of adoption bit, the committee members agreed that this was a
good working definition. This also tied in very nicely with an earlier comment
by a colleague, Ken Laskey of MITRE, that "Governance for SOA [...] is
likely to parallel governance for traditional commerce", and that
"There will be a range of governance depending on the perceived needs of
the participants."
One of the items on my to-do
list is to research the governance practices of large enterprises, especially
ones in which the business units have a great deal of autonomy, to distill some
lessons on what works and what does not work. At this point in time, I
personally have not seen examples of SOA implementations that span Enterprises.
Or rather Enterprises that are equivalent in authority/power/influence. Any
examples you can share would be very appreciated.
As we progressed along
this path, one of the items that became much clearer is that governance by its
very nature implies the authority to govern. That authority can be formal or
informal and could be codified in an explicit manner or implied. But in
all cases, there is the concept of authority. Given this, implementing SOA governance
requires:
Formulation
of polices that are appropriate to the domain
The
ability to enforce the policies
The
ability to obtain metrics on what is working and what is not
Implementing
feedback processes that can adjust the existing policies as needed
<personal comments>
Speaking for myself, and
not for the committee at large, one of the items that we need to keep in mind
regarding governance is that it should not just be the big hammer. It should
also be the mechanism for providing motivators to moving to and doing the right
things in a SOA. Not just the de-motivators. And the reality as regards to SOA
governance is that it should be an extension of your existing IT governance
where you add the SOA specific bits. I think the challenge here will be figuring
out what that amorphous line is. It does not make sense in the SOA RA to
document IT governance components, but there is definitely overlap and
mutual support. Just as with EA and SOA.
Above all, I think we
need to realize that when we speak of formulating SOA polices, we are dealing
with people and behavior and culture and not just technology. Which means it is
messy and imprecise. As the old saying goes "Technology is easy, People?
That's Hard!".
</personal
comments>
You can
find the complete entry @
http://www.aniltj.com/blog/2007/01/03/OASISSOARAAStartingPointForGovernance.aspx
Regards,
- Anil
:-
:- Anil John
:- Johns Hopkins University - APL
:- http://www.jhuapl.edu
:- (240) 228-0612
:-
:- E-Mail Response Time: 24 hrs
:-
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ken Laskey
MITRE Corporation, M/S H305
phone: 703-983-7934
7515 Colshire Drive
fax:
703-983-1379
McLean VA 22102-7508
