Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

8.3. PRODUCTION VERSUS CONSUMPTION PERSPECTIVE

The reality is that every IT organization has two primary constituencies for the services it produces: production or provider-side governance stakeholders and consumption, and consumer-side service users. In addition, on the consumer side of the SDLC, there are two types of consumers: developer consumers who are primarily focused on consuming services during application development for a project often via application assembly or composition processes, and consumers of services or service-enabled applications who are business or end-user consumers. (See Exhibit 8.3.) This distinction is important to bear in mind. Not all service consumption activity is in reality end user or business consumption. Service is also consumed by application assemblers who compose applications by consuming services on behalf of their business end users. There are both consumers and providers within an IT organization, which is a service provider to the business users.

A design-time repository/registry must serve both sets of constituents across the full spectrum of SOA-related Software Development Assets (SDAs), not just the service "bits and pieces" floating above the waterline, to use the iceberg metaphor. There are many more moving parts to a service than what meets the consumer's eye, and these SDAs must be governed in much the same manner as the end result they produce, the consumable service.