SOA Governance in SMEs == Cart Before the Horses

I have always held that SOA governance is premature yet. While we are struggling to just get SOA adoption in the right spirit, governance is the least of our problems. If we cannot identify a mechanism to first re-engineer "service orientation" into IT solutions and have the IT teams in an organization be "SOA aware" ground up and not just deliver the POCs that the CIO or CTO demands, where is the need for operational processes and governance? In this context I found this article that professes a SOA governance approach for SMEs to be quite out of touch with reality.

While the thoughts proposed, such as agile approach to governance and the business users defining the need and IT groups quickly implementing the same, a managed governance process is not necessarily bad. It's just that we are dealing with more fundamental issues right now. Issues that are preventing the widely touted gains of SOA. That led to the drastic predictions of SOAs death!

In the present stage of SOA adoption, where we have just crossed the hype-curve's chasm, and are just now pondering over the serious practical use cases with a full grip on reality (of issues with SOA adoption), all that is immediately needed is anything but SOA Governance. Good tools and utilities to help quickly create services, test services, deploy and manage the same in production. The need for complete SOA lifecycle governance is still a few years away. At least, and surely not for SMEs, their SOA problems will be much more fundamental. SOA Management is what they will need now.

 

Comments

[Eric Roch]

The reason there is such a emphasis on SOA governance it because software vendors wanted to push their tools. I agree that SOA governance is important but can be evolved over time.

See this related post - mine.

http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/the-soa-blog/when-to-buy-a-soa-registry-9023