Getting Agile

Up until a few days ago, I had not heard much about IT governance with the relentless onslaught of SOA into the enterprise. Most of the articles and papers that I did read which were even remotely tackling the issue of governance with SOA were dealing with existing structures and how to fit SOA into them. From dealing with multiple organizations with heavy bureaucratic governance bodies which control only from the perspective of halting progress to a snails pace, I have been wondering how organizations would apply SOA with it‘s real-time dynamics.

Over the past couple of years I have applied smaller footprint governance within small organizations through consulting work. This is not an easy task and usually the plans that I come in with are only halfway, or less, applied to the organization. The problem most of the time is that I do not have the authority needed to apply governance within these organizations as a consultant. I needed champions within these organizations to carry the torch who understand the promise and headaches of governance within an organization.

And when I talk about governance I definitely do not think that governance can be applied at the micro level. Governance is a carefully crafted set of organizational standards which should be attained by the disparate cogs of the company and those components which are relegated to outsourcing. The governance rules should apply value and quality indicators which are to be measured based on metrics and decisions made at all levels of the company. Of course, this is a very simplistic view of governance and reality is much harsher than the green fields of my imagination sometimes. But I can only delve into these water with a shallow reach since this is a blog after all.

So, when I saw this article from The Architecture Journal issue #6 “Taking Governance to the Edge” by Philip Boxer and Richard Veryard I was pleasantly surprised. I have been reading Richard's blog for quite a while now and always find valuable and inciteful information there . I can not do the article justice and therefore I am just going to leave it for you to read. Enjoy!

And also let me know what you think about any particular parts or all of the article in the comments of the blog entry. Thanks.