SOA Governance isn't about technology either...

Today I was on a panel at the International Conference on Service Oriented Computing which was about SOA governance. The panel members were

• Gregor Hohpe (Moderator and now at Google)
• Chris Harding (who did the keynote)
• David Bressler (Progress)
• Tony Carrato (IBM)

And of course myself. Now Chris had done a keynote on Governance from the OpenGroup perspective and talked about the "Three C's" of Governance, Culture, Communication and (IIRC) Control. We had a good set of debates and I'd like to summarize a few of the points made.

1. There must be an impact to violating governance, too often people ignore governance knowing that they will get away with it
2. Governance is not one-size fits all, find appropriate governance models in different areas
3. Governance is about people and process much more than it is about technology
4. The Business needs to be accountable for SOA governance and the business Services
5. IT needs to be responsible for the delivery of SOA and the technical parts of the services
6. Too many companies are buying registries as if that is all they need to do for SOA governance (a top point by Dave)
7. Governance needs to not create big document jockey processes, it needs to be effective
8. Bad governance kills innovation (a good point from the floor)
9. Governance isn't a new IT problem with SOA, projects have failed for years due to bad governance. The point is that SOA provides a better structure for governance than previous project based approaches.
10. SOA governance isn't an IT thing, it impacts the business accountability, the funding model and the full lifecycle.
    

Myself and Tony disagreed about the most effective way to enforce governance, I preferred using a stick with nails in it while Tony felt shooting someone and leaving the body around was more effective. Personally I prefer the stick with nails as its personal, but I see where Tony is coming from :)

The basic piece though was that if you don't switch you governance model to actually be based around the services and the business then you are being wildly optimistic if you think that applying a new technology (like a registry) will solve your problem.

One of the more enjoyable panels I've been on. They were video'ing it but I don't know what happens with the videos, if I find out I'll link it.

Tomorrow its SOA Runtime headed up by Dave Chappell.

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