Automating the SOA Center of Excellence

As service-oriented architecture (SOA) moves from early-adopters to mainstream corporate initiatives, companies are challenged to quickly achieve their intended goals of business agility and cost savings from service reuse. As the primary advocate of SOA within a company, the SOA Center of Excellence is tasked keeping these goals in perspective while implementing technology and more importantly, the people, processes and policies that will drive the changes needed to make SOA impactful to a business across multiple organizational and geographic boundaries.

People

How to best organize the SOA COE and manage the decision making rights.

A successful COE will include cross-functional representation with many different stakeholders that must be addressed. WebLayers enables you to define the individuals and specify an appropriate level of governance decision making rights.  

  • Project and service lifecycle transition – define who is authorized to review and approve throughout every stage of the lifecycle.
  • Policy authors - define the people who are authorized to develop governance policies
  • Policy domains - define the hierarchy in which policies are applied (there may be enterprise-wide policies and division-specific policies) and conflict resolution.

WebLayers also helps the COE to educate and encourage good behavior by empowering project teams to check their work early and often.  It pinpoints exactly where in the code there are policy compliance issues, a clear explanation of the policy, and an example of how it should be applied. This takes away any ambiguity so projects are delivered at higher quality and consistency.

 

Process

How to leverage and extend existing SDLC and IT management processes to meet new SOA challenges.

As your organization expands and matures SOA beyond pilot projects, you need a more automated way to manage and provide visibility on the actual status of all your projects or services.This capability should also integrate seamlessly with your SDLC methodology and extend the capabilities of your existing infrastructure including registries, repositories and portfolio/project management solutions.

WebLayers provides a centralized system to manage, review and audit the lifecycle phases of SOA projects and services. WebLayers automates the manual review process and empowers your SOA Center of Excellence or other internal governance bodies.

 

Metrics

Gaining the visibility to effectively measure your governance efforts.

WebLayers provides the hard evidence about a project, service, artifact, project team or individual.  All governance activities and enforcement data are made available through a COE dashboard to provide enterprise-wide visibility on your SOA initiative.

  • Assess Business Impact - Understand the impact of non-conformance from both a technical perspective (performance, security, interoperability, etc.) and a business perspective (TCO, time-to-market, legal risk, etc.).
  • Trend Analysis - to monitor how your governance efforts are improving over time.
  • Drill-down and filters - for complete conformance and audit information at any level including individual projects, developers or artifacts.

 

Enforcement

How to apply the appropriate level of governance and automate enforcement.

Too much governance can be worse than too little governance. WebLayers provides the flexibility to select the appropriate level of policy enforcement based on the context. For example, in the early phases of development you could provide a more passive approach and notify project teams of issues. As you move closer to production, you can take a more active approach and block users from checking in artifacts to the registry/repository unless they comply.

As your SOA initiative scales, you need to move from manual enforcement to automated enforcement. Architects should be focused on strategic initiatives, not reviewing code. WebLayers automates the deployment and enforcement of policies throughout your enterprise.

  • Define Once, Enforce Anywhere - Policies are dynamically associated with all the applicable systems across the enterprise.
  • Apply When Necessary - Policies that are relevant in one context may be irrelevant in another. You decide when to apply a single policy or an entire policy library.
  • Event-based Enforcement- allows governance without changing your development methodology.
  • Selective Enforcement - to apply the most appropriate level of governance. Active enforcement blocks a user whereas passive enforcement can just log and notify non-conformance.
  • Extensive System Coverage - WebLayers Governors are the only cross-platform, vendor neutral solution to span all the systems across the SOA lifecycle
  • Broad Content Governance – to ensure all the assets created are in compliance.

 

Policies

How things should be done.

Policies are the very foundation of any governance initiative and touch across all aspects of a COE.  Policies guide how things should be done and codifies corporate guidelines, standards, regulations and best practices. 

  • Pre-built policy libraries – the WebLayers Policy Libraries provide the industry’s largest collection of governance policies to jump start your COE.  Select the appropriate policies and begin to govern immediately.
  • Collaborative system to define, mange and share governance policies - Policy makers can quickly and easily define policies using an intuitive wizard-based policy editing interface. A single, logically organized, hierarchical system of domains and libraries provides enterprise access and management for all policies
  • Federated policy management - Policies can be created for use across the enterprise or for specific groups. These targeted uses are known as policy domains. Configurable conflict resolution rules specify which domains take precedence when policy conflicts are detected.
  • Extensive support for artifacts created throughout the lifecycle - Policies can be defined for the variety of assets and artifacts created at each phase of the software development lifecycle -from design documents to source code to service artifacts.
  • Certify Services - Services that conform to your governance policies can be certified before they are put into production. The quality scores are added to the service metadata in your registry/repository and provide better decision making to your runtime systems.
  • Test policies before going into production - Policy makers can assess the business impact of new or changed policies against the current artifacts, services, projects, and systems. WebLayers provides an Impact Simulation environment to analyze compliance results against a new set of policies without interfering with the production environment.
  • Extend the capability of your existing SOA infrastructure - decouple policy management from the end point enforcement enables you to define policies once, and deploy where needed.