Nemertes Benchmark: Service-Oriented Architectures and Applications

Overview:

SOA creates unique challenges for architecture and governance. SOA is a global phenomenon with local significance. As discussed in Volume 1, "Organizational and Operational Trends," organizations are launching SOA initiatives with the goals of greater business agility and flexibility. SOA facilitates these business goals through increased interoperability, faster integration of applications and services reuse. If one distills down the SOA message to one word, it must be agility. Unfortunately, agility is not a term widely used to describe architecture and certainly not a terms used to describe governance. In fact, rigidity and static are far more common descriptors. After discussing these issued with participants, it had become clear that to us that the same driving goals of SOA-Flexibility and agility-must also drive architecture and governance. For organizations to be successful, they must implement an agile architecture with agile governance.

Conceptually, the concept of an agile architecture is not new. Agile governance, however, may be seen as a contradiction in terms. This issue is compounded by two factors: SOA's scope and scale, and SOA's facilitation of encapsulation and abstraction. First, SOA creates applications without borders by facilitating the breakdown of application silo walls. As discussed below, however, from a governance and architecture viewpoint, this creates challenges since a key aspect of governance is separation and at times, isolation, functions typically provided by boarders. Second, a good SOA implementation abstracts the underlying code from the interface, thus presenting a service with a standardized interface, despite the structure and composition of the underlying application. Again, this is great for integration and interoperability. As with the border issue, however, there is the risk that a SOA implementation may actually hid non-compliant applications from plain sight, leading to a potential governance conflict.

Read this Volume: Governance and Architectures

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