Customer Reviews

SOA Governance

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In the IT world everybody seems to have his own understanding of governance. Todd did a good job in this book describing the experiences of a company facing the SOA era. Very well readable book with enough level of details to get a good understanding of how the tree P's within governance (People, Processes and Policies) should be treated to make SOA governance a success within an organisation.

Great book by Todd Biske. I wrote a review of this book on my blog (Google "Mike Kavis"). In summary, Todd uses a fictional company and takes us through a multi year journey from project exception to enterprise wide success. Along the way he presents us with real life scenarios and the solutions to deal with the issues. It is remarkable that Todd can write about a topic like governance and keep us on the edge of our seats at the same time. Must read!

Over the summer, I had the opportunity to read the first draft of my friend Todd Biske's SOA Governance book. Now that the book is available, I want to share 5 reasons why SOA practitioners and managers should read this book.

1. Todd's view of SOA Governance is outcome, rather than product, centric. Todd defines SOA Governance as "the combination of people, policies, and processes within your organization that will ensure that the desired behaviors of your strategic SOA initiative are achieved".

Examples of those desired behaviors, or outcomes, are "increasing the number of assets reused by 10% each year", "decreasing the average time to produce a solution by 10%" and/or "increasing the number of projects delivered by 10% each year".

While Todd does speak to the technology / product categories that enable SOA governance, at no point does he equate (confuse) SOA governance with the acquisition / implementation of a registry, repository, service broker or runtime monitor.

2. The management fable will resonate with any practitioner who has ever worked in corporate IT. Todd explains SOA Governance in the context of the SOA journey of a fictional corporation. The book follows Advasco's SOA advocates, implementers and adversaries from an early win, to the trials of sharing, through the mysteries of problem detection and resolution, and finally to SOA success. As the tale unfolds, Todd points out problem areas, suggests corrective action and supplies best practices.

3. The reference chapter is worth the price of the book. Even if management fables aren't your thing, you'll find Chapter 8, Establishing SOA Governance at Your Organization, to be an indispensable reference. This chapter covers:

-People: solution architect, business analyst, tech lead/domain architect, enterprise/technology architect, information architect, security architect, IT manager, service manager/owner, platform manager
-Organization: Enterprise Architecture, COE/Competency Center, Review Boards
-Policies: Pre-Project, Project and Run-time
-Processes: Establishment, Education/Communication, Enforcement, Measurement
-Technologies: Registry/Repository, Service Testing Platforms, ESB, XML Appliances, Security Gateways, Service Management Platforms, Service Invocation & Exposure Frameworks

4. The advice on governance -- policy establishment, communication, enforcement, measurement and feedback -- is pragmatic, not autocratic. During their SOA journey, the Advasco team faces challenges where what's best for the architecture (long-run) isn't necessarily best for the business that day. Instead of taking an architecture hard line, or business shortcut, the team considers options and implications, and makes pragmatic trade-offs.

5. Exhibiting good SOA form, the book is easily consumed and right-sized.

A brief background on my credentials - I'm with Progress Software, a company that provides software products to companies to help with their SOA needs (among other things). You can read more about my, and my thoughts on these topics at my blog at [...] (make sure to look at my posts, it's a team blog).

That said, I've been following Todd on twitter and a regular reader of his blog for some time. Can't say I always agree with his opinions, and was curious to see how his thoughts evolved into a book on the topic. The result, I must say taught me a few things (which is always a pleasure).

First, I'll point out, it's an easy read. He tells a story, which in addition to being easy to read, importantly makes it easy to remember. And, his story focuses on what's really important - the results. And he does this from the perspective of an IT organization. I think this is a critical perspective, because most IT organizations may speak the "business language" but few, in my experience in over 30 countries, actually deliver.

Why? Well, from this book it's a few simple take-aways:
1. Long term "product-like" ownership of IT assets, vs short-term focus on delivering IT projects
2. Communication and education is as (or more) important than enforcement
3. IT leadership and consistency through the IT organization gives IT more credibility than ever before, significantly improving the likelihood of success, and of surviving set-backs

Let's explore those key take-aways a bit more.

In Todd's fictional company, the perspective of long-term ownership vs. short-term project focus enables ownership over time, and allows Advasco (his fictional company) to build momentum around shared IT assets. Todd also tells a story of how the right leadership can really affect change, again by building momentum over time within the organization's people and processes. It's a story I can both relate to, and as a technology-bigot wish were more common. I believe the benefits of technology are not fully explored at most companies. I think Todd gives us a clear vision of how we can raise the efficiency of IT -- and, it's not by buying more stuff. It's by working smarter.

Early on, the book discusses the importance of communication and education equally to enforcement. Sounds obvious, but, most companies I know spend much more time/effort on enforcement, and when they do communicate, do so at the wrong level.

I found it great, that a book on SOA didn't talk about technology details much. I was afraid I'd be hard pressed to read it all the way through. The last thing I wanted to read was another book on decoupling, or SOA security threats, or the need for a registry, repository, or whatever other product some vendor wants to sell.

I did disagree somewhat with the explanations of service management and the use/importance of a registry and/or repository, but they played a very small part of the book, and I can admit to my own vendor-based biases in that opinion. I tend to be in the minority in my opinions in these areas.

I'll finish with two last points. My favorite, on the bottom of page 55, talked about establishing goals that can be measured. That one subject, including implementation, could probably be a book on it's own!

And, some food for thought... read the section on establishing a center of excellence. I'd be really interesting to have some followup from the author and others on how to determine the ROI for the center of excellence, or otherwise justify the investment. How to allocate costs of the "process change" across projects, to help fund the initial SOA establishment. I think answers to these questions will bring even more reality to a very unique, and practically important book for anyone embarking on an enterprise SOA initiative.

A brief background on my credentials - I'm with Interway , a company that provides software products to companies to help with their SOA needs (among other things).

SOA Governance book (http://www.interway.sk/en/technologies/service-oriented-architecture-soa/resource-center/soa-governance.html) was good introduction into governance topic and how governance is and has to be connected into Service Oriented Architecture.

Mr. Todd Biske (http://www.biske.com/blog/), author of the book, showed the evolution of the SOA and SAO governance on the virtual company "Advasco". He showed how the company was driven for "SOA thinking" and how and why company needed SOA governance. Having virtual actors as employees of the company we could feel the problematic when reading dialogs of them. It was very helpful while reading such dialogs, so the reader could imagine from practical perspective what is the problem and how problem should be understood and resolved. It's easy to remember the SOA governance concepts from this book because it shows life problems on virtual company "Advasco".

The governance exists always, at least some kind of, but having effective governance and understand it is the goal of this book. The book showed and explained the SOA governance from its basic. The book is much suggested when starting with SOA governance. It's suggested for all personnel who need to have feeling and understand governance from it's concept. It is not detailed technical technology overview about governance technologies. But instead it shows relations, timeframes, and aspects of SOA governance from all perspective within enterprise. Especially "Chapter 8, Establishing SOA Governance at Your Organization" is some kind of agnostic references for SOA governance regardless any vendor, technology, enterprise type.

This book is a must-have for all IT managers, architects, PMs and business analysts dealing with SOA issues, be they implementation, governance, or both. I also highly recommend this book for those who are starting or facing IT governance issues in general, even if they aren't contemplating or building-out an SOA at present - the governance principles, techniques, and advice Todd gives apply to much more than SOA.

This book will definitely meet expectation for readers looking for understanding SAO governance concepts and principles. This book is not about hardly reading big topic and hardly consuming it. But Mr. Toad Biske successfully separated concerns in this book into small parts so reader will not get bored or tired with many theoretic structures. On above 200 pages reader get very familiar with SOA governance concepts. It does not go too deep into specific problem but instead it shows overall picture.

i like the approach adn the overall book layout

a good book that can help understand basic governance concepts

for the text this book gets 5 stars

for the cover 1 star

Writing a book on SOA Governance is risky business. The concepts around SOA governance are changing quickly, the technology is defining SOA governance in the marketplace, and the hype has created a noise level that's counterproductive.

What was needed is a pragmatic and real world approach to SOA governance focusing on what matters: the people and the processes. This book is just that.

Todd's ability to drive through the hype, and the noise, and get to the essence of the topic is the value of this book. His pragmatic approach to SOA governance defines both the value of the concept, and the approaches required to get SOA governance working within your enterprise.

In short, he nailed it. If you're doing SOA, this is the best money you'll spend. By this book now.

Dave Linthicum

InfoWorld Real World SOA Blogger
SOA Report Podcaster

My colleague and friend Todd Biske recently authored SOA Governance - The Key to Successful SOA Adoption in Your Organization, which was published earlier in October by Packt Publishing. I offer a review of this work with the disclaimer that not only is Todd a friend, I was given a review copy of his book gratis by his publisher.

While the book provides some technical details regarding SOA implementation, it focuses more on SOA adoption from a business and techno-functional perspective - that is, how enterprise architects, project managers, IT management, and business analysts would comprehend and address SOA as opposed to developers. In explaining SOA and governance concepts, Todd chose to use the "business fable," or "story" style where real-world scenarios and dialog are added within chapters to make his points. This style is similar to that used by Patrick Lencioni in his works ("The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable") and Timothy Johnson (" Race Through the Forest: A Project Management Fable "). This style of writing, while rarely seen discussing technical/tactical topics such as SOA, is highly effective if used properly, and Todd's stories superbly reinforces the material at numerous points.

The book is comprised of the following topics:

* The definition and concepts of governance (with extensions to IT governance), SOA, and linkage to project management and the business
* Avoiding "Just A Bunch of Services" (JBOS) - Enterprise SOA Governance
* Service Versioning
* Business Analysis Governance
* Design-time and Run-time SOA Governance
* Roadmap to establishing and running SOA governance in organizations

A key strength in this book are the many links of proper governance and SOA concepts to the everyday problems and issues faced by IT architects/managers, project managers, and business analysts. In particular, Todd deftly develops and explains the tensions that normally exist between architects (taking a holistic view of IT infrastructure and SOA) and project managers who are under time, cost, and risk constraints to get their projects in production as they were originally planned. Most SOA texts I read come from a purely technical and technology-based perspective, and don't discuss the impacts on the people using, building, or guiding SOA. Thus, Todd's take on these issues is a very welcome addition to the literature.

As with most books that I read, I do have a couple of quibbles. The main one is the book pays little to no attention to data architecture and governance, which are key components of most SOA implementations since its data that's getting moved around almost all services implementations. Some discussion about this linkage would have been beneficial. Another issue that is not addressed, but probably should be, is the role that vendors play in these processes, because in most large organizations, they are a significant factor in most phases of inception, development, and operations. Finally, while the figures and diagrams in the text are numerous and very helpful, it would help the text greatly if they were labeled/tagged as opposed to simply inserted into the text.

This book is a must-have for all IT managers, architects, PMs and business analysts dealing with SOA issues, be they implementation, governance, or both. I also highly recommend this book for those who are starting or facing IT governance issues in general, even if they aren't contemplating or building-out an SOA at present - the governance principles, techniques, and advice Todd gives apply to much more than SOA.

This is the worst SOA book I have ever read. It contains mostly the fictional dialog of people working for a fictional Advasco Company and has little to do with "SOA Governance" as indicated in the title of the book. The book starts off with the dialog of Andrea - the CIO of Advasco, Spencer - an Enterprise Architect, Elena - the Chief Architect, Maria - the Service Manager and other people like Ryan. Following is a quote from the Preface page.

"In each chapter, you will hear a portion of their journey on the path to SOA adoption." Is SOA adoption same as SOA Governance?

The book also talks about Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). However, there is no detail governance about it.

This book is a waste of money and time. Books from Thomas Erl are one of the best in regard to SOA.