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.

Cutting Bureaucratic Red Tape with a Flexible and Managed SOA

To make doing business easier in Denmark, the Danish Commerce and Companies Agency (DCCA) needed to streamline their business registration processes, ease reporting procedures and improve service levels. At the same time, DCCA needed to meet annual budget reduction targets, manage growth and maintain quality. They also wanted to gain visibility over their many systems and projects without increasing their staff.
DCCA implemented a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to manage, govern and communicate services and relationships. Using CentraSite™ and webMethods Tamino, they transformed their system silos into a modern SOA that supports open source and provides high-performance XML document management capabilities. Now DCCA can manage service and application lifecycles, promote service reuse, maintain quality and improve communication.

Benefits include: * Effective governance across their heterogeneous IT landscape and external partner interactions * Increased business agility and ability to respond to legislation changes * Achieved 90% reuse of functionality using SOA Governance * Almost 70% of all business registrations are now handled electronically
Realizing business flexibility with SOA

To gain transparency and control, DCCA's "New Architecture" was designed with a standard, services-based approach using an SOA infrastructure. In this way they could easily manage, govern and communicate available services and service-to-application relationships, and maximize their re-use potential.
Together with their trusted partners Capgemini, and Sirius IT, DCCA selected CentraSite™ combined with webMethods Tamino to transform their systems into a modern SOA with high-performance XML document management capabilities.

As Rasmus Knippel, architect on DCCA's SOA Governance Project and Capgemini Denmark consultant related, "With DCCA we looked for a practical solution that could be implemented rather painlessly while still fulfilling the need to maintain a complete overview of the architecture - and CentraSite™ was the right solution."

The "New Architecture" is a multi-year project that implements SOA step-by-step across DCCA's core applications. CentraSite™ and webMethods Tamino are integrated seamlessly in the open source-based environment along with JBoss components, JBoss Portal and the Mule ESB.

CentraSite™ for SOA Architecture Governance stores all their XML schemas, business rules, Web services and WSDL. And because CentraSite™ was implemented in the initial phase, DCCA has been able to take advantage of powerful governance capabilities, policy enforcement, rules management and service reuse right from the project start.

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