How to do SOA right? An SOA Governance Framework for the ESA Space Situational Awareness Preparatory Programme
Mehran Sarkarati · SpaceOps 2012 Conference · 2012
Service Orientation is a software design paradigm, which promises increased return on IT investments and organisational agility towards business changes. In the past years, the SOA design paradigm has been adopted by a large number of new software development projects. Many organisations are however facing difficulties in demonstrating the value of their SOA projects. This has been mainly because most of early SOA initiatives have been technology driven. This setback has led to a shift in the SOA paradigm, moving the focus from technology to SOA as a design paradigm. Organisations have in the recent years come to realise that the promised benefits of SOA, come unavoidably with the need for more coordination across the traditional boundaries of individual projects and across business lines. This need is typically addressed by establishing some level of governance in an SOA environment. Without an appropriate level of governance the SOA projects can quickly spiral to chaos and end in the undesirable state of "Wild West SOA". An SOA governance is typically defined using a set of "precepts", "processes", "roles " and "metrics", which together establish the framework for making the right decisions when doing SOA. SOA adoption impacts many aspects of funding, planning, implementation and operation of