Over-promising and under-delivering Web services?

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Mar. 10, 2007

In the Web services segment today, enterprise software has a sad history of greatly over-promising and widely under-delivering. Some suppliers I see in the governance space for SOA are repeating that bad history over and over.

That’s really unfortunate, given the tremendous promise in SOA and the important capabilities that are possible for SOA governance.

Today, no Web services vendor can provide 100 percent of a robust governance solution. It may never be that one vendor ever delivers 100 percent of any given solution. Yet I’ve just been reading many vendors talk about their complete end-all-be-all governance solution for SOA.

While several software vendors have a fairly common definition of what a Governance should be, it’s entirely too inadequate to really suffice for a complete, robust, or end-all-be-all solution.

As a matter of fact, most SEO Governance solutions right now are little more than a bundling of WSI tools and scanning XML with X-path queries at run-time for automation, and document repositories for non-automated Governance.

This is barely the beginning of what will create real governance. The outcome of a strict governance strategy is increased visibility, trust and an infrastructure that has longevity compared to the many times we’ve attempted greater reuse and better IT alignment with business.

One of the key areas that organizations need to focus on the topic of governance is in the behavioral area and in making the definition of the word “policy” more rigorous than the meanings frequently used by the so-called governance tools.

Policy will need to be all of the kinds of things that you think of legislatures doing or any kind of rule-making body in our real world. Think about the Federal level, a very broad stroke of Policies. These are the things that some governance tools can do like “Thou shall use WS security for all of the access points from external sources coming on to our network.

But there is also the State level, County level, City level and even Home Owners’ Association, if you think about it.

As a whole, you will never see a Federal Law about where I’m allowed or not allowed to place my US flag. But my Homeowners’ Association has all kinds of rules and restrictions about where I can and can’t place my flag.

So policy is really going to be where we, as an industry, focus Governance tools and within that focus, we’ve got to make sure that our definition of policy captures enough of the “what it takes” to get the value from Governance.

So the next time you are talking to a Governance tool vendor, let us suggest two things:

A) The first is to make them fully explain themselves about what their product does in terms of allowing the definition, modeling and enforcement of governance policy.

B) Don’t just listen – make them show you.

We know of a client that spent seven figures on a tool that was supposed to do a bunch of really interesting policy and governance work that’s barely doing much of that at all. You’ve got to see how the product works.

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Source: Web Services.org

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