Early adopters view governance as key to creating sustainable SOA
ConvergenceAsia staff
22/07/2008

A new global survey issued recently suggests that enterprise adoption of service-oriented architecture (SOA) has ‘crossed the chasm’. Users also identified SOA governance as a key component of sustainable implementations with holistic, lifecycle approaches viewed as a core requirement.

However, the overall maturity of their adoption was regarded as moderate with the state of their governance practices considered lacking. The Best Practices for SOA Governance User Survey (Summer 2008) was produced by Software AG, a global provider of business infrastructure software.

According to the survey, more than 90 per cent of respondents indicated some level of SOA planning underway within their organisations. More than half of all enterprises have already implemented successful SOA-based projects and/or an enterprise-wide SOA.

Respondents also reported considerable satisfaction with their progress to date. Less than 10 per cent were explicitly unhappy with their results so far as satisfaction with SOA beat dissatisfaction by a four-to-one margin. Among those reporting having an enterprise-wide SOA in place, approximately two-thirds said that they were satisfied with their results to date with the remainder reporting that it was ‘too early to tell’.

The survey also found that users overwhelming view governance as being a key component to creating sustainable SOA implementations at the enterprise level with over 90 per cent reporting that it was either critically (54 per cent) or moderately important.

Despite this importance, nearly two-thirds rate their own SOA governance practices as either ‘non-existent’ or ‘insufficient’. Among the best practices identified by the survey was the importance of having a SOA Competency Centre or Centre of Excellence in place to build cross-organisational support for these initiatives. Somewhat surprisingly, the survey also found that senior IT management appeared to be missing from these discussions with less than 20 per cent enjoying active support from the Office of the CIO as just one example.

“With organisations just beginning to embrace SOA governance, a significant void exists in terms of well-established and widely disseminated best practices. The purpose of this survey was to overcome these gaps by determining which approaches are being used in the field to successfully implement SOA governance,” said Björn Brauel, vice president and Deputy CTO, Software AG.

“These results show that it’s never too early to start in terms of governance, with a holistic, lifecycle approach to managing services most often needed. Reflecting the business-critical nature of most implementations, the need to consistently meet service-level agreements for performance was cited as the most common driver for SOA governance. Findings such as these can be invaluable to users struggling to define their own enterprises’ SOA governance strategy.”

The survey was conducted in April/May 2008 and received 176 qualified responses. The full report, Best Practices for SOA Governance User Survey (July 2008), is available for download at www.SoftwareAG.com/soagovernancesurvey. 

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