SOA Governance Through Enterprise Architecture by Manuel Rosa and André de Oliveira Sampaio

Achieving a global enterprise architecture vision that provides mechanisms and tools to enrich the information required for application, process, and project portfolio management Downloads Oracle Enterprise Repository.

Abstract

The ownership cost of technology assets can, and usually does, become significant. The need to centralize, monitor and control the contribution of each technology asset becomes a paramount responsibility for most organizations.

In Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), it is vital to manage the service, the main component of this architectural strategy, and its components. The service’s reuse benefits can easily be diminished without correct analysis of its dependencies and impacts.

Using Oracle Enterprise Repository as the central point of SOA artifacts’ cataloguing makes it possible to obtain a holistic vision and develop synergies between different SOA assets, empowering their re-utilization and analyzing the impact on the organization caused by IT changes. When the SOA domain is considered, the issue of governance should therefore always come into play.

Although SOA governance and its tools are mandatory to achieve any measure of SOA success, their value still passes incognito in most organizations, mostly due to the lack of visibility and the detached view of the SOA initiatives. A number of problems jeopardize the visibility of these initiatives, primarily understanding and measuring the value of SOA governance and its contribution: SOA governance tools are usually inadequate for anyone outside of the technical domain (business analysts, project managers, or even some enterprise architects), and are especially harsh at the CxO level.

A governance strategy is fundamental for SOA and cannot be complete without a global enterprise architecture vision that provides mechanisms and tools to enrich the information required for application, process, and project portfolio management.

By creating a formal, common, representational model, a language (graphic and textual), and standard viewpoints, and by extending the basic capabilities of a SOA governance tool, we can leverage the information for a greater scope and number of analysis possibilities (e.g., time-based, dependency).

To tackle those challenges, Li

nk Consulting has brought Oracle Enterprise Repository’s main functionalities and its own Enterprise Architecture Management System (EAMS) together in a full SOA governance + enterprise architecture solution. The Enterprise Architecture Management System – Oracle Enterprise Edition combines the architecture management solution with Oracle Enterprise Repository to deliver a product specialized for SOA governance. It gathers the best of two worlds (SOA and EA) in a solution that enables SOA governance projects, initiatives and programs, and provides an easier mechanism for exchanging information with the business, other operational areas and project management.

In this article, we describe how an organization can leverage the best EA and SOA governance practices and, with the help of adequate exploration and communication tools (like Oracle Enterprise Repository and EAMS), achieve and maintain the level of quality and visibility that is required for SOA and SOA governance initiatives. Read the complete article here.

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