The following challenges illustrate how effective SOA Governance can enable organizations to realize the benefits of SOA.
Let's look at a large insurance company with multiple Lines of Business (LOBs), such as home, life and auto insurance, each working with the customer separately. The company wants to implement a common customer service process – a one-stop shopping experience for the customer to fulfill all of their home, life, auto and other insurance needs.
Effective SOA Governance can help answer the following:
- Who decides which existing LOB service has the best customer data for the new shared process to be used by all LOBs?
- Who owns the shared service(s)? Who should fund it? Who is responsible for upgrades?
- How to motivate each LOB to reuse the service (rather than their own unique version because they feel they have unique needs)?
- Who decides who can use the service and how often?
Let's look at a large bank expanding into new geographies with differing regulatory requirements. An SOA allows shared reusable business services to be bundled or unbundled as required to enable compliance in each geographical area.
Effective SOA Governance can help answer the following:
- What common business services are needed?
- What potential applications (service consumers) will reuse these service(s)?
- Which policies are common, which are unique? Can the differences be isolated to maximize consistency?
- What services already exist and are candidates for reuse?
Let's look at a large retailer who is facing increasing competition to its online and catalog sales channels. To increase customer satisfaction, they want to institute a new billing policy within their existing SOA environment. However, the development team finds it hard to identify which applications and services are impacted by the new billing policy. But facing a deadline, changes are made to known areas and put into production. Unfortunately, another LOB was using the previous version causing outages, customer complaints and revenue loss.
Although the company had an SOA environment, they had not instituted a way to manage changes and determine who was using the shared services.
Effective SOA Governance can help answer the following:
- How to organize the shared services/assets so they can be effectively reused at a later date?
- Who is allowed to change a service reused by others?
- Who is using a service and what will be impacted by changes to that service?
- Who needs to approve any changes?
- Who will be responsible for funding upgrades to meet a specific user's requirements?
SOA Governance requirements:
- Eliminate and prevent unnecessary service proliferation
- Need for change management for shared services
Company capabilities needed to support the requirements:
- Governance process for SOA
- Change management
- Policies for publishing, using and retiring services
- Infrastructure to help organize and discover services assets and govern access
Let's look at a large telecommunications who embraced an SOA strategy in order to improve staff productivity and lower costs. The Commercial division development team made existing functionality available as services.
Difficulties appeared when the Residential division launched a heavily used new offering which used one of the Commercial division's services. The increased usage slowed response times for every application using the service. It also increased the Commercial division's costs.
Unfortunately, a Service Level Agreement (SLA) had not been implemented, which would have generated a plan to handle the additional workload. In addition since appropriate monitoring tools were never deployed, the Commercial division was unable to charge any other division for the service usage.
SOA Governance requirements:
- Measuring service utilization and cost
- Measuring project cost
- Measuring business benefit
- Access and visibility to information
- Decision rights and governance process
Company capabilities needed to support the requirements:
- Governance process for SOA
- Visibility to usage and project information
- Business and IT dashboards
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