Governance Not Keeping Pace with SOA Adoption?

Bedford, Mass. - As seen just a day earlier, insurers are embracing SOA (see "Survey Says Insurance Carriers Are Embracing SOA"). But new survey results insist that governance is not keeping pace with the adoption of SOAs at most organizations—of which include financial services, banking, government, insurance, healthcare and pharmaceutical.The online survey, conducted by New Rochelle, N.Y.-based ebizQ and sponsored by Bedford, Mass.-based Progress Software Corp., consisted of 313 respondents. While the survey shows that the majority of organizations are actively pursuing SOA, most are relying on manual processes to enforce SOA governance. Less than 6% have automated runtime monitoring of policies, and fewer than 5% automatically check services for policy enforcement before services are checked into a repository.

Progress sponsored the survey to assess the current state of industry preparedness and to raise awareness of the need for governance solutions. The complete results of this survey are included in the ebizQ white paper "The Current State of SOA Governance."

"SOA is more of a business initiative than an IT initiative. Organizations must do a better job of setting and enforcing governance policies in order for their SOA to properly support key business objectives," says Beth Gold-Bernstein, director of the ebizQ Training Center. "Automated solutions for both design time and runtime governance are necessary to effectively manage SOA implementations. Insufficient governance capabilities will negatively impact business agility and service reuse, the top drivers behind SOA adoption."

Among the survey findings:

• 65% of the companies surveyed are actively pursuing SOA in the form of planning, pilots, or production deployments. Most organizations are starting with a small number of services and taking an incremental approach to growing their SOA.
• 64% of respondents cited increased business agility as the most important reason to build an SOA. Other frequently mentioned drivers were IT reuse and business process optimization.
• 94% of respondents either have no methods for governing SOAs or rely on manual processes such as design reviews, manual audits and after-the-fact reporting.

The biggest governance issues reported in the survey are enforcing policies at runtime, and managing the effects of policy change in both the design and runtime environments.
"The most important benefit of SOA is the potential to align IT with the business and sustain that alignment over time. That will only happen if effective governance is in place," says Dan Foody, Sonic and Actional products CTO, Progress Software. "Whether organizations are just starting SOA projects or have a fully deployed SOA, it's imperative that they have the ability to see and manage all services in the enterprise."

Source: Progress Software Corp.