Power Workshops

SOA governance involves various issues:

• Choice of standards, technologies, tools, architectural principles and development practices
• Conformance with legal and industry regulations
• Contracts and service level agreements including for composite applications and composite services
• Service safety analysis, testing and review
• Service instrumentation for management and security
• Change management including for composite applications and composite services
• Service consistency, interoperability and redundancy
• ROI for creation, maintenance, use and retirement of shared services
• ROI correlation with incentive schemes
• Service lifecycle funding
• Procedures for everyday and emergency management of faults and policy exceptions
• Capture and dissemination of knowledge about services
• Consolidation of service implementation mechanisms
• Skill maturity

Effective SOA governance requires the implementation of policies to address these issues. This is far more than definition of a set of procedures. The real work lies in facilitation of policy operation, motivation to comply with policies, measurement of policy effectiveness, and ongoing policy improvement - cohesively, no matter how many business units are involved.

This is a question of process management. However, the processes in question are unsuited to mainstream BPM techniques and tools. Anyone who has worked in a software development organization will recognize that these activities are heavily dependent on human-to-human interaction. Further, this H2H interaction makes the processes very fluid - the activities required for policy implementation often change on a case-by-case basis in order to meet the business and/or technical needs of the moment.

Trying to constrain such processes via use of a mainstream BPMS is a frustrating and misguided activity. In particular, it is not enough to assign actions to people then make these actions available via a task list. It is also necessary to assess the relative value of different approaches, obtain consensus to these approaches, gain individual commitment to the actions required, then facilitate the work. Further, it may be necessary to go round this loop many times in order to keep the work in line with the situation as it changes.

The solution lies in the discipline of Human Interaction Management (HIM). In this workshop, Keith Harrison-Broninski will explore the principles of HIM, including the 5 characteristics of human work, the REACT and AIM patterns, the nature of a collaborative transaction, how to implement agreements on next steps, the 3 levels of control required to integrate business goals with business operations, and the GOOD methodology that integrates HIM with SOA governance via a Human Interaction Management System (HIMS).

Service-Oriented Architecture is first and foremost architecture: a set of best practices for the organization and use of IT resources. A deep understanding of SOA, furthermore, requires an Enterprise Architecture perspective that applies Service Orientation best practices to all aspects of the business.

This workshop carefully defines a Service in the context of SOA, and places SOA best practices into the context of other architectural approaches. Topics that will be covered include:

• Multiple perspectives on SOA
• Characteristics of Services
• Understanding SOA design tenants: Loose coupling, Course granularity, and Asynchrony
• Building the service model
• Creating the SOA metamodel
• SOA foundation: Model-driven architecture
• Process, service and implementation views
• SOA and the Zachman Framework
• What’s in a contract?
• Leveraging service contracts
• Business Services, Service interfaces, and Service implementations