Enterprise SOA

How will governance function within ESA?

Historically, governance issues have boiled down to a battle between control and reduced costs via synergy on the one side and flexibility and needs for specialized support on the other. Highly centralized governance policies have been successful in enforcing standards, preventing redundancies, and thus driving down costs, but have also paid a price in responsiveness. The more concentrated governance becomes, the more project managers and line executives (or any other precursor to business analysts) are straitjacketed by inflexible policies. Every IT organization faces this tradeoff: suffer in response times now, or face the consequences of a sprawling, out-of-control environment later. Which one will it be?

ESA promises to ease the pain either way, because of its standards and services-based approach, where the repository and platform stand in for the central authority while modeling and recomposition grant considerable latitude to business analysts and other tactical users. In Chapter 17, we explain how ESA makes this "federated" approach possible by abstraction—power users have a high degree of control over their composite applications, while the central authority retains ownership of the platform. Even in custom application development requiring new components to be built, the nature of the repository calls for an orderly process to certify those components as standards compliant and govern their eventual reuse elsewhere within the platform. ...