If your techies are insisting that “service oriented architecture” is merely a fancy phrase meaning “Web services” or “application reuse,” they’re telling you only part of the story. Yes, SOA is about application reuse. Yes, SOA often uses XML-based Web services. But more than that, SOA brings governance to your enterprise applications and data. This IT Strategy Guide explains how the heart of SOA is a set of policies that truly aligns IT with the business it serves.
Policies can affect every aspect of the service lifecycle, including design, deployment and operation. In most organizations, it makes sense to begin policy-making efforts with standards, since they’re what make SOA possible. Each enterprise must determine which standards are used where and when. For example, will WS-Security and WS-Policy be used? Under what circumstances will they be required?
Some people claims that “SOA Governance” is a fancy phrase meaning “repositories.” That’s partially correct – but not a reason to dismiss SOA governance altogether. As you work through SOA governance, you’ll generate policies, XML schemas, WSDL documents, documentation, and many other artifacts. To be effective, all that information must be distributed to everyone involved in the project. Sorry, e-mail lists won’t do: Governance artifacts need to be searchable, versioned and easily — and precisely – referenced in a machine-usable format for dynamic discovery and binding. And that calls for repositories.
Good SOA governance also calls for intermediaries that can manage the operation of a full-scale SOA deployment. You don’t want dozens or hundreds of services running all around doing who-knows-what: You need to know what’s been deployed, what works, what doesn’t work. You need to know which services are reliable, and which aren’t meeting their service guarantees. The solution? Proxies and control
systems. We’ll show you how they fit together, and how a concept called the “buddy system” can help improve service reliability in the enterprise SOA.
This guide will also help explain why sometimes, the most important buddies you’ll have are people in other departments. To be effective, SOA requires communication and trust. That’s often scarce in cross-departmental initiatives – especially when policies and centralized control systems are involved. We’ll offer guidance to help you build teams and boards that can bring SOA to light without the fight, starting with finding the right sponsors, and then involving the right people at the right time to make the entire project a success.
This IT Strategy Guide ends with a set of best practices for breaking SOA bottlenecks. After all, tools and applications get you only so far. Any enterprise embarking on an SOA journey needs to know where it’s going and how to make the best preparations. We’ll show you the 10 most common SOA minefields –and guide you to safety.
—Alan Zeichick
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