This is the Safari online edition of the printed book.

Address the #1 Success Factor in SOA Implementations: Effective, Business-Driven Governance

Inadequate governance might be the most widespread root cause of SOA failure. In SOA Governance, a team of IBM’s leading SOA governance experts share hard-won best practices for governing IT in any service-oriented environment.

The authors begin by introducing a comprehensive SOA governance model that has worked in the field. They define what must be governed, identify key stakeholders, and review the relationship of SOA governance to existing governance bodies as well as governance frameworks like COBIT. Next, they walk you through SOA governance assessment and planning, identifying and fixing gaps, setting goals and objectives, and establishing workable roadmaps and governance deliverables. Finally, the authors detail the build-out of the SOA governance model with a case study.

The authors illuminate the unique issues associated with applying IT governance to a services model, including the challenges of compliance auditing when service behavior is inherently unpredictable. They also show why services governance requires a more organizational, business-centric focus than “conventional” IT governance.

Coverage includes

• Understanding the problems SOA governance needs to solve

• Establishing and governing service production lines that automate SOA development activities

• Identifying reusable elements of your existing IT governance model and prioritizing improvements 

• Establishing SOA authority chains, roles, responsibilities, policies, standards, mechanisms, procedures, and metrics

• Implementing service versioning and granularity

• Refining SOA governance frameworks to maintain their vitality as business and IT strategies change

Introduction: A Services Approach  

Chapter 1: Introduction to Governance   

Chapter 2: SOA Governance Assessment and Planning

Chapter 3: Building the Service Factory  

Chapter 4: Governing the Service Factory    

Chapter 5: Implementing the SOA Governance Model   

Chapter 6: Managing the Service Lifecycle    

Chapter 7: Governance Vitality     

Chapter 8: SOA Governance Case Study    

Appendix A: Glossary    

Appendix B: References    

Index  

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 8 Ratings

Make SOA Projects Predictable and Productive - 2009-06-11
Reviewer Rating:
SOA Governance: Achieving and Sustaining Business and IT Agility is a fantastic book which shows how any service-oriented architecture project can be run more predictably and productively, decreasing cost and increasing ROI. The architects and project managers in charge of any significant SOA project should know the material in this book.

The book is written by four very knowledgeable SOA practitioners at IBM (which also explains why it's published by IBM Press). Books written by multiple authors often read as independent chapters that don't flow as a book, but these authors have collaborated well to produce a consistent whole. They have distilled their knowledge of how to manage SOA projects into what is really two books in one: 1) A model for managing SOA projects via 2) A process for performing SOA projects. The latter is based on tasks which produce work products, specific concrete deliverables which make project management much more straightforward. The latter half of Chapter 3 is a catalog of governance work product types, and Chapter 4 catalogs service development work product types. These form the basis for the SOA governance model described in Chapter 5, which details step-by-step tasks in the processes for governing the development of SOA applications, tasks which create the work products described previously.

I enjoyed all the touches of simple, practical advice spread throughout the book. One example is "Our experience has been that establishing a dedicated SOA CoE [Center of Excellence] is one of the most important organizational changes the governance planning team can make." (p. 237) Another example is the sections titled "What Distinguishes the SOA Winners?" and "Antipatterns: Common SOA Pitfalls." (pp. 43-50) Almost every section begins with a quotation that has nothing to do with SOA governance and yet usually illustrates the section quite nicely. For example, the section on "Governance Mechanisms" (p. 33) beings with this quote attributed to Colin Powell: "Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand."

No book is perfect, nor is this one. Chapter 6 on managing the lifecycle is not as strong and badly needs more copyediting. For example, after doing a nice job of distinguishing between processes and tasks (p. 268), other parts of the chapter start distinguishing between tasks and what are sometimes called processes but sometimes called services. I'd also quibble that they focus overly much on whether operations can be automated since it's also valid for a task in a process to be a human task. Nevertheless, these complaints are minor in what overall is a collection of very useful information.

(Disclaimer: I, like the authors of this book, am employed by IBM.)

Thorough discussion of SOA issues - 2009-05-10
Reviewer Rating:
I've used this book several times with my client to broaden their horizons about the benefits and challenges of SOA. Not only does it provide a clear view about the issues related to SOA governance for the leaders of Enterprise Architecture, but it also covers many of the technology issues and nomenclature around the SOA architecture.

I'd recommend it as a leave behind for executives as a piece of thought leadership in SOA design and technology.

SOA Governance by William Brown, Robert Laird and others - 2009-03-30
Reviewer Rating:
"SOA Governance" is the first book I know that approaches SOA Governance in a serious way. Like many other SOA terms, "SOA governance" has become a buzz word and is misused and misinterpreted many times.
The writers of "SOA Governance" solve this problem by firstly giving a right definition of SOA and SOA principles and by then defining "Governance". The book constantly bridges what happens in the organization and in the business to what has to be done in relationship to SOA and therefore helps enormously to implement and safeguard the purpose and benefits of SOA: achieving business agility by means of IT.

Apart from helping to establish SOA governance the book also helps to better understand SOA by explaining important concepts within service orientation like "services", "reusability" and "service contract".

Bob Schat, CSC

Excellent primer for SOA Governance - 2009-03-24
Reviewer Rating:
This book provides an excellent overview of SOA Governance coupled with practical experiences for understanding and applying SOA Governance. More importantly, it describes the importance of governance in terms of business outcomes that can be realized so that organizations can derive value in their SOA deployments.

The book is comprehensive in its approach and its organization allows the reader to jump to chapters of interest. The life cycle approach in the organization of the book makes it clear how to get started.

I especially like the case studies as they provide practical experiences and lessons for applying SOA governance.

The prior reviews are correct that not much time is spent in the automation aspects of SOA governance but that is clearly a topic for another book.

Good Reference for Large Scale SOA Governance - 2009-03-15
Reviewer Rating:
This book is a great reference for large scale organizations that need a handy reference to the various possible processes and artifacts that could comprise an extensive SOA Governance process.

This book will save you a lot of money by reducing (or eliminating) the need to hire expensive SOA consultants to guide you through the mechanics of organizing and structuring a SOA Governance process.

As you read the book, keep in mind that the authors recognize and point out that this isn't a one-size-fits-all. Indeed, they recognize that smaller organizations may need to scale down the processes to suit their environment.

Governance is a complex topic, so I also agree with another reviewer's comment that the reader will benefit greatly by reading other Governance books (such as Todd Biske's) to supplement their views and perspectives on different approaches.

A gentle criticism:

The book seems to focus primarily on manual processes and identifying Governance artifacts to be produced - but gives scant attention to the techniques and mechanics of automating Governance checks that can be performed via Design-Time and Run-Time policy enforcement. This would be an excellent area to expand on in a future revision of the book - and would be an excellent way of supporting the goal of "Agility" referenced in the title.

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