Is there a better way to say SOA governance?
Posted by: StorageSwiss
SOA development, SOA governance, SOA management
At SearchSOA.com we spend a fair amount of time writing about the importance of governance and how you aren’t likely to succeed with service orientation unless you put a solid governance model around those efforts.
Yet let’s be honest, the term “SOA governance” sucks. It reeks of someone else telling you what to do, hectoring you over every little detail of a project. It sounds about as desirable as a colonoscopy with an IMAX camera.
It’s a particularly sticky term here in the U.S.A. We don’t like a lot of governance. In fact, we get uppity when we think we’ve been placed under the yoke of too much governance. We’ll dump your tea in the harbor when that happens. In fact, you can be sure many project teams have formed some unprintable thoughts about governance without representation.
That said, can we admit that stovepipe application development leads to needless duplication of effort and that it actually prevents businesses from pursuing new opportunities? Being a cowboy sure sounds like fun, but if that’s what you want, then go buy a horse. If you want to work for a company with stockholders/investors and a comprehensive benefits package, then maybe, just maybe, you might want to consider how what you do affects the bottom line.
At the end of the day, that’s the crux of SOA governance – let’s put a little organization around all these disjointed IT efforts in order to make them more profitable. I suspect everyone whose hackles rise at the sound of the word “governance” would agree with that statement. No one wants to be the square peg begging for a hammering. Beyond that, who doesn’t want their work to be considered valuable?
The rub comes in how to sum up all of the things that exist under the heading of SOA governance in a term that doesn’t cause automatic resentment. As ZapThink’s David Linthicum noted recently, SOA governance encompasses a lot of import facets in application development and management. We need to call it something. I’ve heard “productivity” and “business value” tossed around as replacement terms, but those still sound a bit too buzzwordy.
As a believer in the wisdom of humans, though, I figure someone out there has come up with a term preferable to SOA governance. Feel free to inundate us with suggestions. We’ll pool them together and then put together a poll to see which one our readers prefer. Who knows, maybe we’ll come up with something that sounds more like something you want to do and less like something someone else is forcing you to do (or trying to sell you).
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