Authors: William A. Brown, Robert G. Laird, Clive Gee, Tilak Mitra.
Publisher: IBM Press (www.ibmpressbooks.com)
Published: December 2008
ISBN-13: 978-0-13-714746-5
ISBN-10: 0-13-714746-5
Format: Soft cover, 416 pages.
Price: $49.99 (plus free access to an online edition of the book after purchasing the hard copy version)
Understanding and then implementing SOA governance
William A. Brown, Robert G. Laird, Clive Gee, and Tilak Mitra, the four authors of the new book, “SOA Governance: Achieving and Sustaining Business and IT Agility”, are all, in their own respective ways, highly experienced with various aspects of SOA, and most importantly, its practical deployment and use within enterprises. Their goal in writing their book, as outlined in the book’s introduction, is to explain to its readers “why so few organizations actualize the full benefits of SOA, why certain dimensions of SOA are not executed correctly, and how other aspects of SOA are implemented to maximize its advantages.” For details about the backgrounds, qualifications, and experiences of the book’s authors, consult the companion Website to the book located at www.ibmpressbooks.com/soagovernance
The generalized term “governance” is defined in the book as addressing “the need for a process or set of processes to ensure that where appropriate the laws, policies, standards, and procedures are being adhered to. It also should appropriately distribute the rights and responsibilities under which an organization makes decisions and operates.” The overall area of governance can be viewed from a number of different governance categories such as political governance; enterprise/corporate governance; industry governance (industry organizations and associations); and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), with a good example of the latter being the International Red Cross.
Following on from that general explanation of governance, a more highly specialized form of governance, of more interest to readers of this review, is IT governance. That form of governance is described in the book as addressing “the application of governance to an IT organization and its people, processes, and information to guide the way for those assets to support the needs of the business. IT governance may be characterized by assigning decision rights and measures to processes, including, but not limited to, those defined by COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology) or ITIL (Information Technology Information Library).” And by going a little further down the chain of governance, the book’s authors then go on to say that SOA governance itself “extends IT governance as enterprises increase their level of service orientation. SOA is a cross functional initiative involving business and IT in the collective pursuit to deliver on the enterprise’s strategy and goals. Hence, SOA governance must bridge any gaps between corporate and IT governance.” By the way, for more information about SOA itself, take a look at the SOA section of the OASIS (“Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards”) Website (www.oasis-open.org/home/index.php). As described in the “About” page of that site, OASIS is “a not-for-profit consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society.”
The “SOA Governance: Achieving and Sustaining Business and IT Agility” book consists of eight chapters, plus a couple of appendixes. Here’s now a brief rundown of each of those sections:
• Introduction: A Services Approach. This part of the book is sure to grab your attention because, after stating the benefits of SOA, it immediately tackles the following two questions, firstly, “What goes right with SOA?”, and secondly, and probably of keen interest to most readers, “What goes wrong with SOA?” Typical problems that occur when companies “jump onto the SOA bandwagon” include poor communication between business stakeholders and personnel from a company’s IT department, and not surprisingly, the length of SOA projects being incorrectly estimated. For this latter problem, the advice from the book’s authors is that “it is advisable to be more conservative than aggressive regarding the estimated timelines for each phase of the SOA project.”
• Chapter 1: Introduction to Governance. In this part of the book, governance is investigated from a number of perspectives including governance in general and then corporate governance, enterprise governance, IT governance, and SOA governance. This is then followed up with a discussion of the SOA governance and management model. In order to ensure that their book is useful in the real world, the authors of the book also use this chapter to introduce a realistic case study. The case study is subsequently used throughout the rest of the book to demonstrate the concepts and theories being put forward. The book’s authors point out that, “at the end of each chapter, the case study will use some of the salient aspects that have been explained to provide an example of the application of those aspects against the governance needs of a fictional company.” Their objective is that “a case study approach will help to drive home the points and help you understand and apply the practical aspects of planning and building a governance capability.”
• Chapter 2: SOA Governance Assessment and Planning. The first step in achieving successful SOA governance is for an organization to take a step back and to coolly assess where it sits currently with SOA and its governance initiative. The second chapter of the book outlines the sort of assessment and planning that should be adopted, and highlights the pitfalls to watch out for, with a common one being continually on the lookout for the “silver bullet” or quick fix solution.
• Chapter 3: Building the Service Factory. Once the current state of an organization’s SOA governance has been determined, the next phase, as described in this chapter of the book, is to build the foundation that is required for successful, and practical, SOA governance. To do that, the approach adopted by the book’s authors is to create a “service factory”, which the authors define as being “an automated production line for the development of services” (this is an approach for software development that takes it lead from the use of a production line by Henry Ford for building cars). Potential advantages of a “service factory” approach include lower costs; consistency and reliability; independence from suppliers; and product flexibility and quicker time to market.
• Chapter 4: Governing the Service Factory. This chapter of the book investigates, in detail, two aspects of the “service factory”, namely, a) what’s needed to actually run it, and b) what’s needed to govern it.
• Chapter 5: Implementing the SOA Governance Model. This chapter discusses IBM’s four phase structure that, as the book’s authors point out, is used “to define the approach to establishing SOA governance”. The four phases are plan; define; enable; and measure. Naturally, the number of activities and tasks involved in building an SOA governance model will vary from organization to organization depending on the scope of an implementation.
• Chapter 6: Managing the Service Lifecycle. Based on previous content in the book, this chapter then provides additional information about management of the services and automated processes.
• Chapter 7: Governance Vitality. The vitality of SOA governance is defined in the book as being “the ability to keep the various dimensions of the governance framework relevant, current, and at the right level as required by the business.” The purpose of this chapter is to show readers how to maintain the vitality of the SOA governance framework.
• Chapter 8: SOA Governance Case Study. Presented in this section of the book are the complete details of the case study that can help readers to apply, in a practical sense, what they have learned from the book.
• Appendix A: Glossary, is where terms and acronyms such as COBIT and ITIL (mentioned above) are defined and explained.
• Appendix B: References contains a short list of the details of books, articles, and Websites where additional information relevant to governance and SOA can be found.
To get a feel for the manner in which the book has been written, as well as a direct look at some of its content, three different sections of it, a total of just under 90 pages, are available online for reading from the site of IBM Press, the book’s publisher (www.ibmpressbooks.com). Those particular sections are the foreword; the introduction; and the fourth chapter. Note that at the time of writing this review, I could not access the sample pages using Mozilla Firefox, but had no problem doing so with Internet Explorer.
In summing up “SOA Governance: Achieving and Sustaining Business and IT Agility”, I agree with Kerrie Holley, an IBM Fellow, who writes in the book’s foreword that “if you are a practitioner, manager, or executive tasked with the job of making SOA benefits real in your organization, this book will help you take SOA governance from concept to reality. SOA governance describes both a framework and method for applying SOA governance in your organization and making it work given your organization’s idiosyncrasies.”