Governance and the Downfall of Business Agility

It's pretty well accepted that business agility is the holy grail of SOA. And most people agree that strong (SOA) governance is a key requirement for an effective SOA infrastructure. So, why am I here telling you that governance is a barrier to business agility?

Historically, strong controls have always been a barrier to agility... and the business finds ways around those barriers. Is the mainframe too tightly controlled by IT to get your job done? Why not move to client/server. Are the client/server deployments are too tightly controlled by IT? Why not move to building situational business apps in Excel. You can, of course, see the exact same pattern emerging between SOA and the move to Web 2.0.

Governance and other forms of IT control almost, by definition, stifle innovation. Why? Because innovation is about thinking outside the box, whereas governance is about defining the box that you're not allowed to think outside. Since innovation goes hand-in-hand with agility, if you stifle innovation, you limit agility.

Of course, I'm definitely not arguing that you follow the "wild wild west" deployment model in your IT organization. What I am advocating is that you carefully think about how and where you want to allow innovation (and thus optimize agility) and ensure that your governance is extremely flexible in these areas. Where you don't need innovation, you can put stricter SOA governance controls in-place.

Let's try and put this into practice. In many cases, it's safe to assume that innovations will come via the creative use of exiting services, not from creating services themselves. If you believe this is true for your organization, you should put more governance controls around service creation, but severely limit the controls that are put around service use. How you do this, without losing control altogether, I'll leave to a follow-up post.

Comments

[Michael Hugos]

A hundred years ago we saw the introduction of a new process for organizing and performing work (now we're looking for another one). That process employed the most powerful technology at the time - industrial technology - to deliver a significant increase in productivity that made possible the rise of the middle class in what we now call the developed world. That new way of working was called the assembly line. Manufacturing companies in the United States (led by Henry Ford) pioneered the introduction of the assembly line in their factories. Soon companies everywhere were using that new workflow process.

So a hundred years later here we go again. Assembly lines and manufacturing no longer sustain a middle class standard of living in the developed nations because other countries can do those things just as well at much lower costs. We need to find a new way of organizing and performing work that employs the most powerful technology of this time – information technology – to create new value and deliver new productivity.

In this search here’s a key point to keep in mind: The assembly line was to the last century as the agile and responsive enterprise will be to this century. An agile enterprise creates value because it evolves continuously as its customers and markets continuously evolve. Unlike the industrial enterprise, its operating procedures are fluid and flexible, not rigid and linear (like an assembly line). It is powered by technology but not controlled or dominated by technology. (There is a formula to measure business agility - see http://advice.cio.com/a-formula-to-measure-business-agility )

FOOTNOTE: My newest book is called Business Agility: Sustainable Prosperity in a Relentlessly Competitive World. It talks about all of this; reviewers say it's a good read with a timely message. You can preview it on Google Books and you can get it on Amazon.