SOA Governance

A comment from Mary

"I'm not an expert on SOA but I am involved and interested in governance and the DBE project.

From my point of view as a social scientist who studies technology, the distributed, de-centralised design philosophy of SOA (and therefore the DBE) challenges a lot of traditional assumptions about governance. That is to say, if the design principles of a peer-to-peer based SOA were carried over into the design of a governance or management structure, the outcome would be interesting, to say the least.

For most people, it is difficult to even conceive of an organisation that is not hierarchical or centrally controlled. The architecture of the DBE technology has proved helpful in this sense because it has created a certain way of thinking. As with other SOAs, the DBE architecture places emphasis on creating meta-models, as opposed to centralised reference models. This in turn has created an emphasis on diversity and the idea that there is more than one way of achieving the same end.

Could the same design philosophy be applied to governance? What would this mean? I guess it would mean encouraging multiple governance models, with an emphasis on ensuring lightweight mechanisms to ensure good inter-communication between models.

I'm aware that I’ve taken SOA as a metaphor here and that there’s a danger in extending metaphors too far. I’m also aware that there's a limit to how far you can talk about technology and humans in the same way. Perhaps technology and management structures are easier to compare. At their worst, both are about limitation and control and at their best, both are enabling and focused on creating opportunities for success."

posted by Nagaraj Konda @ 8:23 AM