SOA will fail without governance, warns Gartner

Service oriented architecture (SOA) projects will fail unless they are tightly managed and audited, analyst firm Gartner has warned.

Addressing an audience of 400 business users and IT heads at the SAP World Tour event in Birmingham last week, Gartner vice-president of research Paola Malinverno warned that developers should not be allowed to modify an SOA. "Public enemy number one is when a developer makes changes to services instead of reusing code," he said.

Malinverno said IT directors faced a challenge. "Reuse is not a benefit of SOA but a hurdle that needs to be overcome in order to improve business agility and lower software maintenance [the two key benefits of an SOA]. The main reason SOA projects fail is because there is a lack of governance."

He recommended that IT directors establish an IT integration team to oversee the development of new services.

Malinverno also said IT directors needed to rethink how programmers are incentivised. Rather than measuring programmer productivity by the amount of code produced, he recommended that IT directors put greater emphasis on reuse of web services.

Such a tactic could improve the chances of an SOA strategy being successful, since programmers would be looking to reuse the existing web services in a firm's SOA.

Malinverno also emphasised that an SOA needed to support change, and was not static. This means users must be prepared to run impact analyses when services are modified, he said.

Read article: The catalyst for governance

Vote for your IT greats

Who have been the most influential people in IT in the past 40 years? The greatest  organisations? The best hardware and software technologies? As part of Computer Weekly’s 40th anniversary celebrations, we are asking our readers who and what has really made a difference?

Vote now at: www.computerweekly.com/ITgreats