Plugging Gaps Instead of Creating New Ones

Joe McKendrick cites interesting observations in his latest post. Ovum reports that enterprises may be creating governance silos within their organizations – silos that handle SOA as a special case rather than managing the overarching software development lifecycle.

Most organizations already have well established SDLC processes. Instead of expanding and tweaking existing processes to encompass the development and delivery of the new breed of services-based applications (SOA, Cloud, BPM, whatever), they sometimes buy into the vendor hype and purchase a "SOA Governance" technology just because they think they need it to be successful.

True, new technologies may be useful in expanding existing processes, but governance-in-a-box seldom works. If the tools you buy don’t play nice with the established behavior of your IT staff, all you will get is resistance. Everyone is way too busy to adapt and change. They can adopt however, if the cost of adoption is small and rewards are large. Before buying yet another governance tool, try thinking about Application governance, not just SOA governance.

You’d expect application lifecycle management vendors to broaden their suites to encompass the requirements in SOA governance. However, most of their efforts so far appear to be marketing and rebranding excercises instead of true product expansions.

If you believe in governance, you already have a bit of it – your software engineering lifecycle is fully capable of handling the new needs for distributed computing. Of course, there are gaps to be plugged. So let’s focus on the plugging those instead of creating a whole new gap!