SOA Governance
April 28, 2010 by BPELforum · 5 Comments
Product Description
SOA Governance is the key to a successful adoption of Service-Oriented Architecture. It is the process of establishing a desired outcome for your efforts, and then leveraging people, policies, and processes to make that outcome a reality. This includes technical policies and standards that guide your design-time activities, policies and processes that impact your project selection and funding decisions, and finally run-time policies that impact your operational management activities. The adoption of Service-Oriented Architecture is intended to improve the efficiency and productivity of your company, and your SOA governance efforts are critical in achieving your goals in quality, consistency, predictability, change management, and interdependencies of services.
This book will help you to understand what requirements you will need to introduce SOA Governance into your company. Running through the people, policies, and processes needed for such an effort, this book will help you to realize the steps that you need to take in order to improve your company’s business process quickly and efficiently.
By following a fictional company’s implementation of SOA Governance from the beginning to its successful end, this book will show you the ups and downs of the process. You will learn how to plan SOA governance according to your company’s needs, so that you can avoid the possible pitfalls that are highlighted through the narrative. Learn about SOA Governance to work your way towards SOA success.
This is the worst SOA book I have ever read. It contains mostly the fictional dialog of people working for a fictional Advasco Company and has little to do with “SOA Governance” as indicated in the title of the book. The book starts off with the dialog of Andrea – the CIO of Advasco, Spencer – an Enterprise Architect, Elena – the Chief Architect, Maria – the Service Manager and other people like Ryan. Following is a quote from the Preface page.
“In each chapter, you will hear a portion of their journey on the path to SOA adoption.” Is SOA adoption same as SOA Governance?
The book also talks about Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). However, there is no detail governance about it.
This book is a waste of money and time. Books from Thomas Erl are one of the best in regard to SOA.
Rating: 1 / 5
A brief background on my credentials – I’m with Interway , a company that provides software products to companies to help with their SOA needs (among other things).
SOA Governance book (http://www.interway.sk/en/technologies/service-oriented-architecture-soa/resource-center/soa-governance.html) was good introduction into governance topic and how governance is and has to be connected into Service Oriented Architecture.
Mr. Todd Biske (http://www.biske.com/blog/), author of the book, showed the evolution of the SOA and SAO governance on the virtual company “Advasco”. He showed how the company was driven for “SOA thinking” and how and why company needed SOA governance. Having virtual actors as employees of the company we could feel the problematic when reading dialogs of them. It was very helpful while reading such dialogs, so the reader could imagine from practical perspective what is the problem and how problem should be understood and resolved. It’s easy to remember the SOA governance concepts from this book because it shows life problems on virtual company “Advasco”.
The governance exists always, at least some kind of, but having effective governance and understand it is the goal of this book. The book showed and explained the SOA governance from its basic. The book is much suggested when starting with SOA governance. It’s suggested for all personnel who need to have feeling and understand governance from it’s concept. It is not detailed technical technology overview about governance technologies. But instead it shows relations, timeframes, and aspects of SOA governance from all perspective within enterprise. Especially “Chapter 8, Establishing SOA Governance at Your Organization” is some kind of agnostic references for SOA governance regardless any vendor, technology, enterprise type.
This book is a must-have for all IT managers, architects, PMs and business analysts dealing with SOA issues, be they implementation, governance, or both. I also highly recommend this book for those who are starting or facing IT governance issues in general, even if they aren’t contemplating or building-out an SOA at present – the governance principles, techniques, and advice Todd gives apply to much more than SOA.
This book will definitely meet expectation for readers looking for understanding SAO governance concepts and principles. This book is not about hardly reading big topic and hardly consuming it. But Mr. Toad Biske successfully separated concerns in this book into small parts so reader will not get bored or tired with many theoretic structures. On above 200 pages reader get very familiar with SOA governance concepts. It does not go too deep into specific problem but instead it shows overall picture.
Rating: 4 / 5
i like the approach adn the overall book layout
a good book that can help understand basic governance concepts
for the text this book gets 5 stars
for the cover 1 star
Rating: 5 / 5
Writing a book on SOA Governance is risky business. The concepts around SOA governance are changing quickly, the technology is defining SOA governance in the marketplace, and the hype has created a noise level that’s counterproductive.
What was needed is a pragmatic and real world approach to SOA governance focusing on what matters: the people and the processes. This book is just that.
Todd’s ability to drive through the hype, and the noise, and get to the essence of the topic is the value of this book. His pragmatic approach to SOA governance defines both the value of the concept, and the approaches required to get SOA governance working within your enterprise.
In short, he nailed it. If you’re doing SOA, this is the best money you’ll spend. By this book now.
Dave Linthicum
InfoWorld Real World SOA Blogger
SOA Report Podcaster
Rating: 5 / 5
My colleague and friend Todd Biske recently authored SOA Governance – The Key to Successful SOA Adoption in Your Organization, which was published earlier in October by Packt Publishing. I offer a review of this work with the disclaimer that not only is Todd a friend, I was given a review copy of his book gratis by his publisher.
While the book provides some technical details regarding SOA implementation, it focuses more on SOA adoption from a business and techno-functional perspective – that is, how enterprise architects, project managers, IT management, and business analysts would comprehend and address SOA as opposed to developers. In explaining SOA and governance concepts, Todd chose to use the “business fable,” or “story” style where real-world scenarios and dialog are added within chapters to make his points. This style is similar to that used by Patrick Lencioni in his works (”The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable”) and Timothy Johnson (” Race Through the Forest: A Project Management Fable “). This style of writing, while rarely seen discussing technical/tactical topics such as SOA, is highly effective if used properly, and Todd’s stories superbly reinforces the material at numerous points.
The book is comprised of the following topics:
* The definition and concepts of governance (with extensions to IT governance), SOA, and linkage to project management and the business
* Avoiding “Just A Bunch of Services” (JBOS) – Enterprise SOA Governance
* Service Versioning
* Business Analysis Governance
* Design-time and Run-time SOA Governance
* Roadmap to establishing and running SOA governance in organizations
A key strength in this book are the many links of proper governance and SOA concepts to the everyday problems and issues faced by IT architects/managers, project managers, and business analysts. In particular, Todd deftly develops and explains the tensions that normally exist between architects (taking a holistic view of IT infrastructure and SOA) and project managers who are under time, cost, and risk constraints to get their projects in production as they were originally planned. Most SOA texts I read come from a purely technical and technology-based perspective, and don’t discuss the impacts on the people using, building, or guiding SOA. Thus, Todd’s take on these issues is a very welcome addition to the literature.
As with most books that I read, I do have a couple of quibbles. The main one is the book pays little to no attention to data architecture and governance, which are key components of most SOA implementations since its data that’s getting moved around almost all services implementations. Some discussion about this linkage would have been beneficial. Another issue that is not addressed, but probably should be, is the role that vendors play in these processes, because in most large organizations, they are a significant factor in most phases of inception, development, and operations. Finally, while the figures and diagrams in the text are numerous and very helpful, it would help the text greatly if they were labeled/tagged as opposed to simply inserted into the text.
This book is a must-have for all IT managers, architects, PMs and business analysts dealing with SOA issues, be they implementation, governance, or both. I also highly recommend this book for those who are starting or facing IT governance issues in general, even if they aren’t contemplating or building-out an SOA at present – the governance principles, techniques, and advice Todd gives apply to much more than SOA.
Rating: 5 / 5