Avoid Just-In-Time Governance
I just read David Linthicum’s “Governance Monday” post, Can SOA governance technology be distracting? In it, he discussed some of his conversation with Anne Thomas Manes of The Burton Group. He states that SOA governance technology can “muddy up the water in the early stages” of the effort. I certainly agree with this. These technologies can be complicated, especially when striving for a highly integrated, automated approach. There is a risk that the reason for using the technology can be forgotten as the focus shifts toward getting the technology implemented.
There is another question I would like to address: can governance itself be distracting? While Dave covered the technology angle, what about the governance processes? I did an interview with Loraine Lawson of IT Business Edge last week, and in that interview, I stressed that organizations must avoid starting too late with their governance efforts. If you are adopting SOA to change the way you approach solution development, you need to make the desired behavior known early and often. If you wait until a team “misbehaves” before making them aware of the correct behavior, it will create animosity. If you wait until the situation is critical before embarking on the change associated with SOA, you’ll be forced to take a heavy-handed approach, much as world governments were forced to take heavy-handed actions with current financial crisis. It was necessary, but no one is happy about it.
Want to know more? Check out my book, SOA Governance.
3 Responses to “Avoid Just-In-Time Governance”
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“If you wait until the situation is critical before embarking on the change associated with SOA, you’ll be forced to take a heavy-handed approach, much as world governments were forced to take heavy-handed actions with current financial crisis. It was necessary, but no one is happy about it.”
Not to mention the added expense and time involved in such scenarios. Almost all of my clients are cutting back at the moment, and if something akin to this happened, it would not surprise me if some heads started rolling…as to whom w/r/t IT or governance people, that’s an open issue.
Todd,
We are about to go back to work for a client who got some help from us earlier in the year. They went off for a bit, created some services, and took some hits due to poor governance. We predicted this would happen and it did. No hard feelings though. Sometimes it takes getting burned to realize you need to be careful.
[…] Biske recently posted a response to Linthicum’s piece, agreeing that you should not let the SOA governance technology drive how you approach SOA goverance. But he also warned against starting too late on SOA governance: “If you are adopting SOA to change the way you approach solution development, you need to make the desired behavior known early and often. If you wait until a team ‘misbehaves’ before making them aware of the correct behavior, it will create animosity.” […]