Customer Reviews

SOA Governance: Achieving and Sustaining Business and IT Agility

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book gives a fair understanding of what a governed SOA should be. However, many advices in the book are too high level or are too obvious. Also, there are a lot of typos and mistakes in the book that are very annoying. Example : diagram 6.2 is supposed to show the services lifecycle, but a totally different diagram is shown instead. Page 288, question 'Are the candidate operation tasks or processes ?' is later transformed in 'Are the candidate Operations tasks or Services', etc. The subject of SOA is difficult enough, please check your product before selling it. Chapter 6 deals with the most interesting subject but it is treated very poorly.

This is the best book about SOA Governance that I have read. Its content matches well with its title. Followings are the chapter names so you know what it covers.

Introduction - A Services Approach

Chapter 1 - Introduction to Governance

Chapter 2 - SOA Governance Assessment and Planning

Chapter 3 - Building the Service Factory

Chapter 4 - Governing the Service Factory

Chapter 5 - Implementing the SOA Governance Model

Chapter 6 - Managing the Service Lifecycle

Chapter 7 - Governance Vitality

Chapter 8 - SOA Governance Case Study

Well worth the money. You will not be disappointed to own one.

William Brown, Robert Laird, Clive Gee, and Tilak Mitra have written the most authoritative book I've found on SOA Governance. They are highly experienced professionals who have put the guidance in "SOA Governance: Achieving and Sustaining Business and IT Agility" into practice on many real-world projects with great success. The book they've written provides comprehensive coverage for all aspects of SOA Governance including its context with respect to business agility and benefits, corporate and IT governance, and related IT disciplines.

Most importantly, the authors define the business rationale for applying SOA Governance and the benefits that can be realized. The authors discuss meaningful metrics and measurements tied to the business and its operating model. They demonstrate methods for defining business-aligned metrics and measurements as well as how to use these to gauge governance progress, effectiveness, and maturity.

Mr. Brown, with whom I worked and under whom I studied SOA Governance while at IBM, and his fellow authors filled this book with guidance that really works. Serious professionals in the IT department will want keep this book close at hand.

__Joseph Starwood ([...])

Great book on SOA governance and the considerations to make when establishing this for your organization. Written from a pragmatic viewpoint. I found this to be well laid-out and an enjoyable read (as much as the topic of SOA Governance will allow, anyway). Happy to have this in my personal library. Recommended!

I strongly recommend this book for senior IT management, SOA architects and anyone interested in how to make an SOA project a success. The principles read like they were directly from the SOA projects I've worked on in the past, what works and what doesn't. The sections on IT organization in the beginning are the best I've ever seen. The service governance sections are also the best, essential for anyone developing design time governance standards. The service examples are an absolute must read for anyone desiring how to learn to define services and their granularity. I couldn't have written much better myself :)

Overall, I commend the authors and IBM for providing such an invaluable book for the progressive IT organization - fail to read at the peril of not delivering ROI on your SOA projects, delivering on-time and within budget. I've sent recommendations to all involved.

Interesting topics and good book organization.

I think that it contributes to understanding of governance in general and not only to SOA.

I've used this book several times with my client to broaden their horizons about the benefits and challenges of SOA. Not only does it provide a clear view about the issues related to SOA governance for the leaders of Enterprise Architecture, but it also covers many of the technology issues and nomenclature around the SOA architecture.

I'd recommend it as a leave behind for executives as a piece of thought leadership in SOA design and technology.

"SOA Governance" is the first book I know that approaches SOA Governance in a serious way. Like many other SOA terms, "SOA governance" has become a buzz word and is misused and misinterpreted many times.

The writers of "SOA Governance" solve this problem by firstly giving a right definition of SOA and SOA principles and by then defining "Governance". The book constantly bridges what happens in the organization and in the business to what has to be done in relationship to SOA and therefore helps enormously to implement and safeguard the purpose and benefits of SOA: achieving business agility by means of IT.

Apart from helping to establish SOA governance the book also helps to better understand SOA by explaining important concepts within service orientation like "services", "reusability" and "service contract".

Bob Schat, CSC

This book provides an excellent overview of SOA Governance coupled with practical experiences for understanding and applying SOA Governance. More importantly, it describes the importance of governance in terms of business outcomes that can be realized so that organizations can derive value in their SOA deployments.

The book is comprehensive in its approach and its organization allows the reader to jump to chapters of interest. The life cycle approach in the organization of the book makes it clear how to get started.

I especially like the case studies as they provide practical experiences and lessons for applying SOA governance.

The prior reviews are correct that not much time is spent in the automation aspects of SOA governance but that is clearly a topic for another book.

This book is a great reference for large scale organizations that need a handy reference to the various possible processes and artifacts that could comprise an extensive SOA Governance process.

This book will save you a lot of money by reducing (or eliminating) the need to hire expensive SOA consultants to guide you through the mechanics of organizing and structuring a SOA Governance process.

As you read the book, keep in mind that the authors recognize and point out that this isn't a one-size-fits-all. Indeed, they recognize that smaller organizations may need to scale down the processes to suit their environment.

Governance is a complex topic, so I also agree with another reviewer's comment that the reader will benefit greatly by reading other Governance books (such as Todd Biske's) to supplement their views and perspectives on different approaches.

A gentle criticism:

The book seems to focus primarily on manual processes and identifying Governance artifacts to be produced - but gives scant attention to the techniques and mechanics of automating Governance checks that can be performed via Design-Time and Run-Time policy enforcement. This would be an excellent area to expand on in a future revision of the book - and would be an excellent way of supporting the goal of "Agility" referenced in the title.