27 May 2010

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.

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