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
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