Gaining Adoption of SOA Governance

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Michael Stamback's Blog | July 19, 2007   9:54 PM | Comments (0)

In my last blog, I mentioned that SOA Governance is a complicated beast that requires a mix and match of technology and non-technology elements.  When speaking with some customers recently, a common complaint I heard was that they have implemented a registry or repository but no one uses it or the quality of information is found lacking.  While some are looking to the technology to solve this problem, it's generally a problem of adoption within the organization or resistance to being governed. 

It is a natural tendency for people to resist change and even more so, to resist the notion of 'big brother', which is how many see governance.  In fact, at the Gartner AADI summit last month, Paolo Malinverno had asked the audience how many people felt governance was a necessity within their organization - everyone rose their hand.  His follow-up question was how many people wanted to be governed - 80% of the people put their hand down.  So herein lies the problem.  Governance without enforcement provides no value, but how do you make sure the process established is adopted and followed to ensure compliance?

I will admit that there are certain things that technology, such as registries and repositories, can provide to ease the resistance to adopting governance.  There has to be an easy, automated way to have what you are producing get populated into the central catalog, for example.  However, the best approach I've found to getting governance adopted is to establish an incentive model.

There are multiple approaches to establishing an incentive model, but the carrot and stick approach I've found tends to work the best.  Some use more carrot then stick, while others use just stick.  For example, one customer I've spoken with in the past months used a pure stick approach by making governance activities a part of their developers' performance criteria.  Those that didn't follow the governance model were let go.  That's probably a little extreme in my opinion, but it works for that customer as it's an expected part of the developer's job. 

However, I've found that a mix of carrot and stick works best.  For example, some customers use funding as their carrot.  Development teams or projects that follow the governance model established are ensured of receiving additional funding to continue to evolve their projects.  Those that don't follow the established process risk losing funding.  Another approach is that the architectural review committee will stop deployment of applications and services that have not followed the proper governance activities, such as populating the registry or repository with relevant artifacts and metadata. 

It's through these types of approaches, along with having the right technology in place to make the process less painful, that organizations have had the most success in gaining adoption to SOA governance.  So if you're having trouble getting your organization to populate your registry or repository, try establishing an incentive model that rewards those that follow the process and discourages circumnavigating it. 

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