RE: [soa-rm-ra] Governance Paper

Michael,

This was interesting reading. Thank You.

They divide governance into two large buckets:

Functional governance which seems to tie in with providing motivators and de-motivators at the organizational level to moving to a SOA approach. This is where active support from management etc.. play.

What is missing seems to be the information on the feedback loop on how these were implemented. i.e. Once those “..rules and guidelines….” Have been defined, how did you handle non-compliance etc.? Also, how did they bridge Functional and Technical Governance? Did the folks from on high, authorize a central team to be the “governance police?” (which is what seems to be implied)

Technical governance which is related to the development of a “..set of architectural rules and guidelines together with technical prescriptions” on how the technology implementation is done.

I personally would actually break down the Technical Governance aspects of it further into Operational/Run-Time Governance and Design-Time Governance aspects as the manner in which you would handle and implement them would be a bit different.. There is the opportunity to automate (at least the monitoring aspects) of the former, while the latter is more of a process based approach.

In the paper, they also espouse a way of looking at the information system according to 5 views:

Strategy view. This view describes the strategic objectives of the enterprise in term of business and in term of its information system. All the decisions made in the other views must be related to one of the objectives in the strategy view.

Business view describes the business processes and business activities, independently from the internal structure of information system. This is the view in which live the end users.

Functional view aims at structuring the information system into processes and business services. This view, which is not meant to be seen by end users, is essential for the efficiency and the maintainability of the information system. This view should be as independent as possible from the technology and technical aspects of the IT system. This is the view in which live the functional architects

Application view aims at implementing the functional specification into an IT system. This view deals with application modules and technology choices. This is the view in which live the technical architects and the application developers

Infrastructure view contains the description of the IT physical infrastructure of the company (computers, networks, …). This is the view in which live the IT operations

.. which may tie into the views and viewpoint discussion here.

Some interesting comments:

“moving from a vertical silo-based architecture to a layered service oriented architecture proved to be a complete mental shift for most participants of the program. If not taken care of, it quickly leads to confusion and potentially blockage of the program (when you ear end-users arguing about the format of the WSDL, then you know that you’ll soon be in trouble)”

“We found out that it is important to avoid hierarchical relationships between the objects in the views, because such relationships tend either to recreate the silo-based architecture or to lead to a confusion of the roles between the actors (e.g. end-users arguing about SOAP

encoding rules)”

Regards,

- Anil

From: Michael Stiefel [mailto:development@reliablesoftware.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2006 9:01 PM
To: soa-rm-ra@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [soa-rm-ra] Governance Paper

In my reading I came across the following short paper on governance models.

It stated that it was based on the work done in France on the Copernic system. I do not know if anybody is familiar with it, but the paper states that it was "a complete refactoring of the entire fiscal IT system: 9 years duration, more than 1000 people with 70 projects and a budget of 900 million Euros". It claimed that it was "probably to date the largest IT system fully implemented according to the SOA paradigm.

Any project that big should have some interesting ideas on governance.

Michael

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