I’m at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit in Nashville this week, as a few of you know, perhaps you are here. The sessions have been pretty good, albeit a bit on the high level side of things…but that’s what Gartner does, takes complex topics and makes them more understandable.
The highlight of yesterday was SOA Governance and the SOA Portfolio: Joined at the Hip given by Daryl Plummer. I thought that Daryl did a great job in describing a topic that has been evolving a lot lately, and indeed is often defined differently. Daryl was attempting to show the synergy between the Enterprise Architecture concept of Portfolio, as related to SOA. Moreover, how a SOA portfolio works with SOA governance solutions and approaches.
Can’t say I can disagree with that, clearly we are seeing EA and SOA, both notions and technologies, beginning to morph together into something that will hopefully be more useful. I think that many enterprise architectures are too static and fragile, and something has to be done…SOA or not.
Daryl does not see the differences between runtime and design-time SOA governance, since runtime services often have to be redesigned. While I can’t disagree with that, I do see many problem domains where there should be different tools and approaches for the design time and runtime side of things. Also, the SOA governance tool vendors are falling on either side right now…not sure any provide one-stop-shopping for both runtime and design-time solutions.
One of the things I see missing for Daryl’s presentation, which was excellent by the way, is a step-by-step procedure for approaching both SOA governance and SOA portfolio management. Cleary, that’s something that SOA Practitioner’s are asking for.