Service Oriented Architecture Field Guide for Executives

11.1. LIFE WITHOUT GOVERNANCE

Service oriented architecture (SOA) governance (or the lack thereof) is realized across three primary touch points:

1. Providing a service

2. Consuming a service

3. Supporting agreements between service provider and consumer

First we will explore the impact that a lack of governance has across these three touch points. Then we will examine how circumstances change once governance is introduced.

Touch Point 1: Providing a Service

One of the great advantages of SOA is that services are deployed into a common, standards-based environment. Client applications, other services, and even business processes can consume those services and use them as needed. This capability to reuse services in different contexts to solve business problems is a huge win in terms of information technology (IT) cost control, time to market, and overall system maintainability. The dark side of this is that in the absence of governance, any number of clients can use a service as often as they like. A service might originally have been created to support up to 150 requests per hour. Several weeks or even months after it is deployed, another business unit might decide to reuse that service in a business process that is executed up to 200 times every minute. Service performance would drop dangerously low or the service might even buckle completely and go offline.

Touch Point 2: Consuming a Service

Another tremendous advantage of SOA is that clients that consume services do not need to understand ...