The Four Stages of SOA Governance

For several years now, ZapThink has spoken about SOA Governance “in the narrow” vs. SOA governance “in the broad.” SOA governance in the narrow refers to governance of the SOA initiative, and focuses primarily on the Service lifecycle. When vendors try to sell you SOA governance gear, they’re typically talking …

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.

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.

ZapThink SOA Implementation Roadmap 3.0

Download or purchase ZapThink’s popular “ZapThink SOA Implementation Roadmap” poster!

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 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

European SOA: Ahead of the Curve?

I’m in Germany right now, looking forward to a session at ZapThink’s Practical SOA in Frankfurt event tomorrow. I’ll be joining some peers from companies like T-Mobile, Swisscom, Novartis and SwissLife who are going to be sharing their own SOA success stories.

Why does SOA seem to be moving forward a little faster in Europe than in North America? We’ve posed these kinds of questions in our surveys and forums, and often it seems that stateside, the term “SOA” can polarize some IT teams – it’s an “either/or” decision at the architectural level.

Read more at: SOA World

ZapThink Podcast: Practical SOA Frankfurt Sneak Peek

Special ZapThink “Sneak Preview” Podcast for January 8, 2008 features:

Ron Schmelzer, Managing Partner, ZapThink

Ingo Arnold, Enterprise Systems Architect, Novartis Pharma AG

Wolfgang Otto, Principal Systems Engineer, BEA Systems

Florian Mösch, Vice President Enterprise Integration & Architecture, T-Mobile Deutschland GmbH

Jason English, iTKO, iTKO

Dr. Waldemar Lohrer, Senior Berater, Swiss Life

Tim Hall, SOA Center Product Management, Hewlett-Packard

Lars Drexler, VP Sales Enablement, Software AG

Listen to this Podcast and you will get a “Sneak Peek” at what all the presenters will be speaking about at our Practical SOA event in Frankfurt, Germany, on January 15, 2008.

SOAPscope Bubbles Up Into Quality Center

“Without the ability to automate SOA testing, the processes and procedures around SOA quality assurance won’t provide the same value,” said David Linthicum, managing partner with ZapThink and SOA Watch columnist for SD Times. “The integration with HP Quality Center and new test automation capabilities in SOAPscope Server will allow those charged with testing SOAs to become more effective.”

Read more at: SD Times