SOA MUST Have Data Governance

Service Oriented Architecture is the hot movement in IT right now, and rightly so. It leverages code in a way that makes it flexible and reusable, integrates legacy and one-off systems, and solves just about every other problem in the world.

So, if you're bringing this to your organization, good for you. A key piece to your soa roadmap should be an effective Data Management plan. Your Data Management plan should include Data Quality, Metadata, and Data Governance.

Lets face it, soa will integrate all your systems and allow for sharing across many lines of business and systems. But, what is shared? The Data. Let me reiterate that... The reason for soa is so that data and information are processed more efficiently and effectively.

So, doesn't it then make sense that your data needs to be well managed, controlled, clean, etc? Well... yes.

Metadata will level set everyone in the organization as to what the data actually means. Hopefully you have an enterprise data dictionary, but if you don't, write that down as task #1.

Data Governance will provide the proactive and reactive management needed to ensure everyone agrees on what a field is to be used for. The results of this end up in the metadata repository mentioned above.

Data Quality checks for data anomalies and procedures should kick-out any outliers to be manually or systematically corrected based on business rules.

So, be sure to integrate an effective Data Management plan in your SOA roadmap, otherwise it will be a bumpy road at best.

For the best information on Data Governance visit Michael's Data Governance Blog at http://datagovernanceblog.com

There are a wealth of resources on Data Governance Maturity Models, Conferences, Tips, Advice and even contests for prizes!

Thanks To : Business Intelligence BI Software Applications Buy Cheap Samsung N135 Netbook SOA Business Intelligence BI Software

Using SOA Consulting and Development to Improve Your Business Value

The main function of SOA is to move company ITs from an outdated system architecture, based on autonomous applications tightly coupled together by custom integration processes, to a modern type of architecture, developed on independent services, which are loosely coupled, using standards-based messaging. SOA improves IT infrastructure by making it less expensive but much more efficient, flexible and easier to expand and reuse. 
In SOA environments, companies can overcome the main gap in legacy systems between their business requirements and the capabilities of their IT systems.

However, SOA development is still considered an IT issue. One of the reasons is that IT managers are not successfully explaining SOA's business benefits to upper management. Also, upper management is not really interested in processes for better IT utilization or in recognizing SOA's potential.

To get support from upper management for the successful development of SOA, it is important to build a roadmap that illustrates an understanding of not only the technologies but also the business value, impact, technology capabilities, interactions between systems, robustness, lower development costs, and security factors. A number of business related issues are important for SOA strategy and technologies:

• Agility in changing systems to follow new and changing business processes.
• Solving problems of badly integrated systems, which requires a lot of development, time, and money to integrate.
• Problems of data and business logic spreading, which can cause unexpected difficulties
• High maintenance costs.
• User dissatisfaction with the current system.
• Possibility for step-by-step systems upgrading.

These are only some arguments that can be used by IT managers for presenting SOA advantages to management. Moreover, SOA consulting and development companies, whose analysts and architects are able to explain the advantages of SOA to an organization could also be very helpful. They can also assist your company in the development of SOA principles and best practices that guide planning, development, integration, and management of application infrastructures. In addition, they can be useful when preparing a business case that demonstrates the value of SOA to upper management.

It is crucial that SOA consultants and businesses work together in conducting an analysis. The most important factors for SOA strategy are the business analyst and the SOA architect; the former is responsible for representing the business requirements, while the latter is responsible for ensuring compliance with the IT strategy.

An analysis provided by a business analyst and an SOA architect can be used to justify investment in SOA. A clear and comprehensive analysis prepared through an open and constructive dialog, is the perfect way to demonstrate the value of SOA and IT synergy to upper management.

In this way, IT and SOA become a fundamental part of the business strategy and can provide significant improvements for your company.

More information: http://www.tridens.si/expertise/soa/ Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Miha_Lavtar

Ensuring SOA Success with Effective, Automated Control throughout the Lifecycle

Technology should always be an enabler, not an inhibitor, of achieving business goals. The inability of inflexible, tightly coupled legacy systems to respond quickly and effectively to business needs is a key reason companies have invested in flexible, loosely coupled SOA.

But without proper control, the flexibility of SOA can devolve into chaos. By definition, SOA brings a dramatic increase in the number of interdependent moving parts in the systems environment. In turn, an increase in the number of parts is accompanied by an exponential growth in the number and complexity of interdependencies.

Uncontrolled SOA allows services to be developed, invoked, and orchestrated at any time into complicated construction. Rather than creating a platform for effective reuse and responding rapidly to business goals and changing market conditions, it leads to redundancy in development and lack of visibility into systems that impact key processes.

Unfortunately, under this scenario not only do companies end up failing to achieve the return on investment they anticipate, they may even spend more time and money over the long haul than they would have under traditional development. IT may see more redundancy of services and greater infrastructure complexity as a result of poor SOA Governance and through the uncontrolled proliferation of services that are that are difficult to locate or inadequately constructed or understood.

Forward-looking IT organizations have recognized the need for Service Oriented Architecture Governance: a strategy where each service is an asset that has to be properly designed to be useful within a larger portfolio of business services - versioned, secured, managed, and monitored to ensure that it performs with the expected quality of service (QoS).

SOA governance begins with creating standards for designs and processes that must then be applied to assets as they are created, used, and changed. However, to enforce these standards, time- and resource-strapped architecture organizations need powerful, automated SOA governance solutions. These solutions must also enable companies to efficiently and effectively apply and enforce governance throughout the entire lifecycle-from design time, to run-time, to change time. By making governance an up-front part of SOA implementation strategy, you will greatly enhance your chances of success and achieving a lasting return on your investments.

About the Author
Software AG deliver software for improving business processes and its software portfolio helps foster new levels of IT agility through Service Oriented Architecture and allows the rapid creation of new business processes with BPM.