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In October 2011 Gartner published it’s Magic Quadrant for SOA Governance Technologies. Gartners sees the market for SOA governance technologies keeps changing, driven by more comprehensive requirements from end users. The most important change since their previous report in 2009:

Clients today prefer to buy SOA governance solutions that will serve their purpose throughout the whole SOA endeavor, governing services and artifacts through different projects from planning and design all the way to implementation operation and retirement.

The most important change that I see at our customers compared with two year ago is that they more more interested and willing to invest in governance technologies.

What is SOA Governance about

SOA governance technology is about:

• Tracking and monitoring the artifacts in a SOA
• Enforcing and ensuring compliance with the policies associated with the artifacts
• Measuring the outcomes related to their use

Oracle’s SOA governance offering

Oracle’s offering in the Governance technologies market is part of it’s Fusion Middleware product line. It includes the following products (see this this blog):

• Oracle Enterprise Gateway and Oracle Web Services Manager – Full life cycle policy management
• Oracle Enterprise Repository
• Oracle Service Registry
• Oracle SOA Management Pack

This number of products and the complexity of Oracle’s offering can make it hard to get a good grasp of what product will cater your specific needs. Should you need more insight visit our SOA governance seminar.

On December 13th Whitehorses will host a seminar on SOA and Governance. During this seminar we will show the value of a proper architecture and governance for your organization. In the presentation you will get clear guidelines and steps on a pragmatic approach for implementing a manageable SOA solution.

Some of the topics:

• What is SOA Governance and Why do we need it?
• SOA reference architecture – The importance of solid standardization.
• Service life-cycle governance – Design and build the right services and the proper way to reuse them.
• Service repository – With examples of repositories based on Oracle Enterprise Repository (OER) and a wiki.

rsvp.

While in a previous post I was arguing that we should handle industry models with care, because of very inconvenient side effects. This week I’ll blog in a similar way on centralization. Among the effects of centralization are often overlooked or neglected dis-economies of scale.

Dis-economies of scale

One of the main reasons for centralization is to gain economies of scale. Less known are the dis-economies of scale. I’ll give some examples in the paragraphs below.

The cost of communication between the central group and the rest of the organization. Although there are lots of tools that make communication easier. Distance in the physical sense or within an organization can create boundaries. These have to be dealt with and there are costs incurred for that. Besides that it has to be clear who to communicate for what matters. This, in my experience, is not always the case. With a greater (organizational) distance more effort has to be put into this.

There is a large possibility that top heavy management in a centralized department becomes isolated from the effects of their decisions. In other words the feedback loop is broken. Because the communication loop is broken, decision become more and more dysfunctional. This due to the lack of real world knowledge that should be incorporated in these decisions.

Centralization can lead to reduced agility. On one hand standardization is a great asset. The larger part of architecture, whether it is enterprise architecture, process architecture or infrastructure architecture, is about standards and reducing the “solution space”. This has several advantages, among which the reduction of software- and systems entropy. The downside of a centralized body that maintains standards is that it probably will lead to inertia and unwillingness to change.

I’m a big fan of (open) standards. They simplify life! However we should not neglect that standardization comes at a cost. There are the costs for implementing, adapting to and maintaining standards in our organization. Say for example that we use a canonical (data) model. There is are maintenance costs (at least some effort) while adopting to change outside and within our organization. These costs of standardization tend to be hidden.

What to do?

Bring the effects described before into the business case for centralization. You did make sure that there was some sort of trade off when you decided to centralize a certain part of your organization didn’t you?

Take measures to prevent these risks. It goes without saying that these measures will take effort, time and possibly money. Now you know you’re going to take measures don’t you?

Recently while listening to OTN ArchBeat podcasts, a panel discussion on Reference Architectures (part 2 and part 3) I was thinking back to some pieces I wrote on industry data models and processes that I didn’t share with you yet. There a some similar argument to using these and reference architectures.

The value of reference models whether it contains data models, standardized messages, processes of a reference architecture, is or should be in a faster time to market and better quality of the solution.

Handle with care

What makes it hard to achieve this value, is the fact that these models contain always far more than is needed. That can be considered a waste. Even the parts that are not used still require attention while implementing and maintaining. This incurs work to understand the complex model, hide the details you don’t need, and customize and extend the parts you need.

Implementing a reference model requires spending time to determine how and to what extend this model meets the needs of your business? That is typically something you have to discover for yourself. It is where the majority of the time is spend! If you don’t go through the effort of understanding your business requirements, you are missing understanding of how the business can and should use the model. That makes it very hard to determine the value of the end solution to the business.

When using a reference models you should be aware that your business is not average. In some shape or form it delivers value to your customers in away a reference model doesn’t provide. Reference models should be used with care your business deserves.

Today I presented at ODTUG Kaleidoscope. The presentation is aimed at supporting architects and especially developers to choose the right integration infrastructure for a job.

You might have read here or on other blogs that SOA isn’t a purpose. It is a means to an end. The same goes for all the technologies that we use when implementing a SOA, or an architecture, or an application in general. So I wanted to share the next video with you since I think that it – in an even broader perspective – shows this point. Technology itself is not good or bad. It all boils down to how we as people use it.



Source: RSA.org 21th century alignment.

Later this month on the 27th and 28th of April the 4th International SOA Symposium and the 3th International Cloud Symposium will be for the first time held in Latin America – Brasilia, Brazil. More info on previous editions can be found on this blog. The 2011 SOA Symposium program consists of:

• Expert Speaker Sessions
• 10+ Conference Tracks
• 4 Expert Panels
• 4 Keynote Speeches

Given the location simultaneous translation (English-Portuguese-English) will be available in all technical sessions. For the complete agenda or resources from previous conference, check the site. Videos from the 2010 edition of the SOA Symposium can be found on InfoQ.

Although there can be a lot of debate on what is Architecture in the world of IT, what IT degree programs discuss about architects, and on who is an architect and who isn’t, I think it is clear that it is not exactly Brain Surgery. And i think that is actually a good thing. Although the implementation of a (Service Oriented) Architecture is in most cases bound to hit vital parts of an organization it isn’t …

And even though there can be just as many parameters in the larger equations, architecture isn’t exactly rocket science either…

On April 27 and 28 2011 the worlds largest SOA and Cloud Computing event will be held in Brasilia, Brazil. The International SOA and Cloud Symposium brings together lessons learned and emerging topics from SOA and Cloud projects, practitioners and experts.

There is a Call for Presentations:

The SOA and Cloud Symposium 2011 program committees invite submissions on all topics related to SOA and Cloud, including but not limited to those listed in the preceding track descriptions. While contributions from consultants and vendors are appreciated, product demonstrations or vendor showcases will not be accepted. All contributions must be accompanied with a biography that describes the SOA or Cloud Computing related experience of the presenter(s).

All submissions must be received no later than February 15, 2011. An overview of the tracks:

• SOA Architecture & Design
• SOA & BPM
• Real World SOA Case Studies
• SOA & Cloud Security
• Real World Cloud Computing Case Studies
• REST & Service-Orientation
• BPM, BPMN & Service-Orientation
• Business of SOA
• SOA & Cloud: Infrastructure & Architecture
• Business of Cloud Computing

You might be interested in previous post on the SOA Symposium or the 2010 presentations.

The session I presented at the SOA Symposium 2010 is now available online via InfoQ. You can find it as a Service Bus case study. It is introduced as:

a case study of using a service bus in a supply channel connecting a wholesale supplier with hundreds of retailers, the overall context and challenges faced – including the integration of POS software coming from different software providers-, the solution chosen and its implementation, how it worked out and the lessons learned along the way.

Watch the video, download the mp3 or sheets.