MMIS - 621. Deliverable Set B

Title: Project Management in SOA Governance.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract
Feedback del-a
Table of Contents
Statement of the Problem
Introduction
Necessity of SOA Governance and consequences of an Ungoverned SOA
Strategies to achieve SOA Governance
Summary
References

ABSTRACT OF PAPER
In this paper it is explored the role of project management in the area of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to achieve governance. The necessity of SOA governance and some potential consequences of an ungoverned SOA are discussed. A strategy involving multiple elements necessary to achieve SOA governance including SOA policies and lifecycle management is evaluated. Some of the conclusions of this article are that a good service life cycle model can enhance SOA governance, and also that good management and governance ensures high quality SOA software products. On the other hand, an ungoverned SOA can become a liability for the enterprise, reversing the positive cycle, and adding costs and disrupting processes.

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) improves the flexibility and adaptability of organizations by accelerating processes and reduces IT costs by making services reusable. Managing services and other SOA artifacts across a complete lifecycle is the only way to achieve the promise of SOA. In this sense, the management of the SOA is an intrinsic part of SOA governance. The SOA project manager plays a key role in SOA governance (Gu & Lago, 2007).

Introduction
SOA governance is an evolving concept; it may be viewed as management architecture: a framework that blends the flexibility of SOA with the control and predictability of a traditional IT architecture (Kajko-Mattsson, et al. 2007). Governance becomes more important in SOA than in general IT because service consumers and service providers run in different processes, are developed and managed by different departments, and require a lot of coordination to work together successfully. There is a unique aspect that SOA adds to governance, it acts as an extension of IT governance that focuses on the life cycle of services to ensure the business value of SOA (Maurizio, et al. 2008).

Necessity of SOA Governance and consequences of an Ungoverned SOA
Gruman (2006) said that "SOA governance helps you set the house rules: how activities are carried out. If you don't have SOA governance, all you have is a bunch of web services." SOA introduces many independent and self-contained moving parts as components which are reused widely across the enterprise. Those components are a vital part of mission-critical business processes (Koch, 2006). SOA has the potential to introduce risk and, with lack of governance, it can disrupt business processes and create significant problems. SOA governance is about managing the quality, consistency, predictability, change and interdependencies of services. It's about the combination of the flexibility of service orientation with the control of traditional IT architectures (Koch, 2006). The SOA project manager is responsible for managing projects, defining project plans, implementing the plans, and monitoring the project (Kajko-Mattsson, et al. 2007)
An ungoverned SOA can become a liability for the enterprise, reversing the positive cycle, and adding costs and disrupting processes. In fact, the Gartner Group estimates that a lack of working governance mechanisms in mid- to large-size (greater than 50 services) SOA projects is the most common reason for project failure. As with any management initiative, a key goal is to minimize risk - in this case, by defining an SOA strategy that builds governance into its core. There are some potential consequences of an ungoverned SOA mentioned in Maurizio, et al. (2008) such as the lack of trust in service offerings, causing consumers not to reuse services because of unpredictable quality and performance issues. Second, escalations in support costs through an onslaught of help desk and field service calls due to service issues and outages. Also, it can produce lack of interoperability creates silos of business services and perpetuating the same challenges of a traditional, tightly coupled architecture. Finally, security breaches by allowing arbitrary access to data and services.

Strategies to achieve SOA Governance
SOA governance requires a cohesive strategy involving multiple elements and it cannot be implemented by a single technology vendor. There are four potential elements necessary to achieve a service-oriented architecture governance (Gruman, 2006) that includes: SOA polices, SOA contracts, Lifecycle management, Metadata, and Registry and Repository
In this paper, only the two elements with more impact in the role of the project manager, SOA polices and lifecycle management elements are discussed. SOA is highly distributed, heterogeneous and very dynamic. For those reasons policies are critical for SOA artifacts to be governed by specific business, technical and regulatory policies. An initial step in policy definition is to turn existing service rules - which often exist as soft-copy documents - into a set of standard, reusable policy files that can be associated with services. Linking service and policy lets you automatically validate services and enforce specific policies. Once they're defined, policies are used throughout the service lifecycle. The goal is to first ensure that quality issues are detected before services are put into production. Once in production, organizations should ideally implement runtime policy management capabilities for monitoring and automatically enforcing policies during service usage. (Koch, 2006).
The management of the SOA lifecycle is an intrinsic part of SOA governance. SOA lifecycle management includes: Monitoring performance of service requests and timeless of services responses, Maintaining problem logs to detect failures in various systems’ components, Detecting and localizing those failures, Routing work around them, Recovering work affected by those failures, Correcting problems, and Restoring the operational state of the system.
The management phase also includes managing the business model – tuning the operational environment to meet the business objectives expressed in the business design, and measuring success or failure to meet those objectives. SOA is distinguished from other styles of enterprise architecture by its correlation between the business design and the software that implement the design, and its usage of the policy to express the operational requirements of the business services and process that codify the business design. A good service life cycle model can not only facilitate the life cycle management of service-oriented systems but also can enhance their governance. Good management and governance ensure high quality SOA software products (Gu & Lago, 2007).
The management phase of the lifecycle is directly responsible for ensuring the reinforcing of those policies, and for relating issues with that enforcement back to the business design (Maurizio, et al. 2008). Management system also involves performing routine maintenance, administering and securing applications, resources and users, and predicting future capacity growth to ensure that resources are available when demands of the business call for it.

Summary
The concept of SOA governance is already a prerequisite for a successful SOA implementation. In SOA, multiple applications need to share common services, which means they need to coordinate on making those services common and reusable. This cooperation and coordination is provided by SOA governance, which covers the tasks and processes for specifying and managing how services and SOA applications are supported. A good service life cycle model can enhance SOA governance. And a good management and governance ensure high quality SOA software products. The absence of SOA governance can disrupt the business. Instead SOA of making the business more agile, it could become more fragile.

REFERENCES
Gruman, G. (2006). SOA governance: How to manage development and use of services. Retrieved June 02, 2008, from CIO Magazine Web site: http://www.cio.com/article/23930/SOA_Governance_How_to_Manage_Development_and_Use_of_Services
Gu, Q., and Lago, P. (2007, September). A stakeholder-driven service life cycle model for SOA. Proceedings of ACM SOSWE '07. 1-7. Retrieved April 30, 2008, from ACM Web site: http://0-portal.acm.org.novacat. nova.edu/
Kajko-Mattsson, M., Lewis, G.A., and Smith, D.B. (2007, May). A framework for roles for development, evolution and maintenance of SOA-based systems. 7. Proceedings of IEEE Computer Society SDSOA '07. Retrieved April 30, 2008, from ACM Web site: http://0-portal.acm.org.novacat. nova.edu/
Koch, C. (2006). ABC: An introduction to Service-oriented Architecture (SOA). Retrieved June 04, 2008, from CIO Magazine Web site: http://www.cio.com/article/40941
Maurizio, A., Sager, J., Jones, P., Corbitt, G., and Girolami, L. (2008, January). Service oriented architecture: Challenges for business and academia. Proceedings of IEEE Computer Society HICSS '08.315. Retrieved June 01, 2008, from IEEE Computer Society Web site: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/HICSS.2008.387