Doing top-down SOA governance is much harder that talking (or writing) about it. In my recent blog article Escaping the SOA Trough of Disillusionment, Dave Shearer reinforced the main argument that there is insufficient focus on SOA as a business concept by commenting that “a Burton Group report found 4/5 SOA implementations in their study group failed because they addressed technology integration adequately and business integration inadequately.”
But the challenge remains. Exactly how can you go about implementing a governance mechanism that engages business executives – the ones that control the investment decisions – in a practical way? Is there a proven methodology that actually works, or is top-down SOA Governance just one of those phrases we throw around without any meat behind it?
There is some good news. One of the early pioneers in recognizing the importance of a service-oriented approach is Art Caston. In 1993, Caston co-authored Paradigm Shift: The New Promise of Information Technology, which introduced the core concepts of a service-based model as the primary organizing principle for organizations. He went on to found Proact Business Transformation Inc. which provides enterprise architecture practices and business consulting for large organizations. While Caston isn’t as widely known as other architecture pioneers, such as Zachman, his methodology was unique for three reasons: 1) it is a service-based approach, 2) it tackles architecture from a business perspective, and 3) it includes a meta-model supported by a repository that maintains the service definitions and relationships to other architectural elements.
The Proact methodology takes a holistic perspective and defines four views of an enterprise: business, operational, systems, and technology. The business view caters to the strategists and planners involved in assessing market opportunities, expanding product portfolios, leveraging partnering opportunities, and other key areas of strategy development. The operational view describes the essential functions of the enterprise and is used to design effective business processes and well-defined organizational accountabilities. The systems view defines how information management applications can be used and linked to automate business process workflow and transaction management. The technology view contains the architecture models used to design the underlying IT infrastructure, including user devices that access these applications, the computers that run the applications, and the networks that connect it all.
A key feature of Proact is the use of service-based orientation for modeling the enterprise at the operations level. From a business perspective, the relationships between external entities, such as suppliers, channels, shippers or customers, are described based on the services that flow between them. Services include provision of goods, selling of goods, transport, installation, and repair. A service-oriented approach is useful at this level for identifying cross-enterprise collaboration opportunities, evaluating in-sourcing and out-sourcing scenarios, and assessing integration synergies with merger and acquisition candidates.
This same concept can be applied to “internal” supply chains of large corporations. Functional groups are linked by the services they provide to each other. This provides a powerful way to view the internal capabilities of the enterprise, since the services focus on the purpose and results of the function. A service-oriented approach provides clean delineations for designing process interfaces, establishing meaningful performance metrics, and aligning functional accountability throughout the organization.
The net result is a model of internal and external business services that are relevant to the business including the information exchanges between them. It is this matrix of “service functions” mapped to “information subjects” that provides a crisp and unambiguous definition of business services that is essential for a top-down governance process.
