Better Goverance for IT Results

Few topics in today’s organizations present such a diverse set of both business and technology challenges as governance. Governance consists ofestablishing chains of responsibility, policies that guide the organization, control mechanisms to ensure compliance with those policies, and communication and measurement amongst all parties. However, what constitutes a policy and what activities and tools the organization requires for governance are questions that have a broad diversity of answers.

Nowhere are the differences among various definitions of governance more pronounced than in the contrast between lines of business and information technology (IT). From the business perspective, top executives as well as government regulators set policies for the organization, which explain in often broad terms how various individuals within the company must act in certain circumstances. From the IT perspective, however, governance covers a range of policies that span the gamut from purchasing and hiring policies all the way to firewall and coding policies and enforcing service-level agreements.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a well-adopted approach to organizing IT resources to better meet the changing needs of the business. Governance is essential to ensuring that organizations realize the business benefits of SOA consistently through their IT implementations. Furthermore, as such firms adopt SOA, they become better able to provide more flexible governance overall. The big win for SOA governance, therefore, extends well beyond the SOA initiative and applies the lessons of SOA governance into all parts of the organization.

This paper explores the relationship among SOA, IT and corporate governance, defines the key lessons of SOA governance, and summarizes how these best practices expand well beyond SOA to deliver better governance overall.

Progress Software Names New CEO

Overall, Progress “has quite a few good assets in the SOA and integration markets,” said ZapThink analyst Ronald Schmelzer via e-mail. “However, they are in many ways a second-tier vendor competing against the much more entrenched incumbents: IBM, Oracle, Software AG, HP and Microsoft.”

Market consolidation, such as Oracle’s purchase of BEA, has further cemented the position of the incumbents, Schmelzer added.

But this in turn “makes Progress continue to be a good second choice when end-users aren’t first considering their existing incumbent vendors,” he said. “Without Progress itself getting acquired by one of the ‘big guys,’ I don’t see how this dynamic will change.”

Read more at: PC World

Progress puts its Mindreef assets to work on SOA

“Combining quality and management capabilities makes a lot of sense. Governance quality and management all fit closely together,” said ZapThink managing partner Jason Bloomberg. “For the Actional tool to be competitive with the likes of [Hewlett-Packard], it makes sense to include quality.”

He noted that Progress Software is a long-term partner of HP and that Actional often works in conjunction with the Systinet registry/repository.

Read more at: SD Times

SOA Industry Future Trends

Presentation for EDS Webinar on February 17, 2009. Covers future trends in SOA, including Software-as-a-Service, virtualization, cloud computing, Enterprise 2.0, and Enterprise Mashups.

29-slide PowerPoint in pdf format.

Latest HP SOA Systinet automates service scaling

“The most important new features of Systinet 3.0 include better integration with and governance of business processes, as well as improved scalability,” commented Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst and principal at ZapThink. “These capabilities put Systinet neck and neck with its two main competitors, Software AG CentraSite and IBM WebSphere Registry and Repository.”

Read more at: SD Times

ZapThink Announces Major Update to Popular SOA Implementation Roadmap Poster

ZapThink, the industry’s foremost experts, advisers, and educators in the field of Service-Oriented Architecture, is responding to customer demand with today’s publication of the third version of its popular “ZapThink SOA Implementation Roadmap” poster. The company distributed over 100,000 copies of its first two versions of the poster, the first in 2003 and then updated in 2005. The latest version adds cutting-edge thought leadership in SOA, includes detail on architectural artifacts, and expands coverage of SOA Quality, Enterprise Mashups, and more.

Read more at: Emediawire

Governance, Quality, and Management

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach to organizing IT resources to better meet the changing needs of the business. While many organizations are somewhere on their SOA roadmaps, many such organizations face challenges when planning the underlying infrastructure that will support their SOA implementation. One reason for this challenge is that there are three core infrastructure areas that are jointly essential to the success of separate, but overlapping SOA effort: governance, quality, and management.

Governance means creating, communicating, and enforcing the policies that apply to the behavior of IT and its users. Quality is a measure of how well working systems meet the needs of the business. Management focuses on how well those systems meet performance, security, and other non-functional requirements for working software. In the context of SOA, however, these three sets of capabilities begin to merge.

To provide the business agility benefit that is the core business motivation for many SOA initiatives, governance, quality, and management need not only apply to the design time and run time phases that traditional software projects exhibit. In addition, SOA requires these capabilities apply to the change time phase as well, where organizations reconfigure and recompose Services to meet changing business needs. As a result, the governance, quality, and management challenges that SOA presents go beyond traditional IT concerns.

HP, EDS Expand SOA Outsourcing

EDS views its SOA consulting work in the context of its role as an IT service provider, and the company leverages its knowledge to expand its offerings to outsourcing clients, and SOA is the best way to do that, according to Zapthink’s ZapNotes.

Read more at: Integration Developer News

HP Extends Quality and Management Software to Meet New Requirements for Mainstream SOA Adoption

“As SOA becomes an increasingly mainstream approach to enterprise architecture, HP continues to offer governance, quality and management products that form essential SOA infrastructure,” said Jason Bloomberg, managing partner at SOA advisory firm ZapThink. “HP’s new SOA testing and management products provide the framework enterprises require to ensure IT delivers production-ready services that can support business-critical applications and processes, making it easier for Quality Management and Operations groups to support SOA-based applications while leveraging existing IT investments and talent.”

Read more at: Business Wire

HP integrates design and runtime SOA governance

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst, ZapThink LLC., said the SOA Manager/Systinet combination “brings together design time and runtime SOA governance in a single integrated lifecycle, essentially providing closed-loop SOA governance.”

The public availability of the GIF specification is the other important part of the HP governance announcement today, Bloomberg said. “The GIF news is important because it will help drive long-needed interoperability in the industry among a wide variety of SOA-related offerings.”

Read more at: SearchSOA