1. Achieving SOA Governance through Organizational Consensus SOA e-Government Conference Hosted by MITRE and The Federal SOA Community of Practice
September 30, 2008

2. Achieving SOA Governance through Organizational Consensus
Challenges Federal Agencies face in selling & executing SOA
Why Governance
When is the time right
Executive Support – Defining the Value Proposition
Stakeholder Incentive
Identifying key stakeholders
Identify strategies to overcome knowledge gaps and inertia
Workshop Format – The Tool for Developing Organizational Concurrence
Strawman Models
Integrating Services Governance into the organization
Q & A
Appendix

3. Governance – A Central Pillar of SOA
SOA Principles
Governance
Enterprise
Architecture
Guidance
Design Patterns
Common Services
Platforms & Tools
Center of
Excellence
Messaging
SOA Roadmap

4. Challenges Federal Agencies face in selling & executing SOA
Resource Constraints
Organizational Silos
Technology Transfer
Resistance to Change
System Silos
Incentive: What’s in it for me?

5. Why Governance?
SOA Governance defines the principles, processes, and roles required to manage, use and update the Service-Oriented Architecture. Key considerations include compliance with external requirements (FEA, OMB, etc.) and extension of existing life-cycle process details and control/quality gates.
Supports SOA rollout success by providing a well defined and accepted set of principles,
Provide clear definition of the development process,
Enhances lines of communication across project teams that know the business, and
Organizational support for governance and policy enforcement.
Lack of Governance will promote new silos (Why? When individual business units/groups make their own decisions about what and how to develop applications,.  they create silos; because these decisions may be incompatible with one-another and certainly don't take into account the needs of other business units. Why do I care? With centralized governance, we make decisions that make sense for the entire enterprise while taking into account the needs of all groups.
Service Orientation is becoming more popular and we want to “catch the horse before it leave the barn”

6. Governance – When is the time right?
Establish a Light-weight Governance Model up front.
You do not know everything at once
You cannot do everything at once
You do not want to inhibit innovation, growth or adoption, but you don’t want to recreate the Wild West
Establish, and experiment with, some SOA Building Blocks
Design, Develop, and Implement an initial set of Services
Develop initial design patterns
Put a very basic SOA Platform in place
Using your experience, develop an SOA Roadmap
Define what you want to achieve
Establish your priorities
Develop a realistic plan on how you want to get there
Your Roadmap should reflect a Capability Model that allows your organization to grow in your targeted areas at a pace that your organization can absorb. There is no one- size-fits-all answer.
Wild West – Shoot ‘em all, and let God sort them out.
Marge Simpson, The Simpson’s - Your Uncle Arthur used to have a saying. "Shoot em' all and let God sort it out." Unfortunately, one day he put his theory into practice. It took 75 federal marshals to bring him down.
We do not have that kind of leadership

7. Executive Support – Defining the value proposition of Common Services Governance
Obtaining Executive Support
“Significant change initiatives require strong support from executive leadership. This typically only happens when there is a compelling need to make the change and the senior management of the organization understands the need and drives the change.” (Practical Guide to Federal SOA, section 4.1.2,
Common Services are enterprise assets that must be developed with enterprise quality according to enterprise standards and policies to ensure ongoing operations, reduce integration costs and complexities, and mitigate risks.
Governance provides the mechanisms necessary to ensure Common Services conform to and deliver on stated promises:
Enterprise standards and expectations of Integration,
Reduced Costs,
Increased Business Agility,
Extend lifetime of legacy systems while facilitating Orderly Transition from
Legacy to Modernized Systems
Ensures consideration of provider by consumer
Ensures consideration of the consumer by the provider
Service Level Agreements

8. Stakeholder Incentive: SOA Success promotes Organizational Success A key challenge is to make Service Ownership and consumption desirable
While the Service consumer (and the organization as a whole) has a clear advantage to reuse, the Service provider currently has little or no incentive to develop services. After all, in a Project-oriented culture, a Service provider is generally provided budget to develop individual projects, not Common Services.
Providers and Consumer need to know they are not wasting their time working on Enterprise Services, Governance Coordinates Design/Development/Implementation
For the Executive - Concentrates limited resources where and when needed on Enterprise level Common Services
For the Developers – Governance insulate them from polarizing prioritization issues and other non development issues in a multi-consumer environment
For the Business – Realize some capabilities sooner, aggregate cost of services between organizations
Conclusion:
Implementation of SOA concepts and execution provides benefits to all stakeholders, but an initial investment is required.

9. Identifying key stakeholders
Who should be part of developing governance?
Anybody who has to live by it…
Developers
Project Managers
Technical Advisors
Engineers
Infrastructure
Operations
Security
Enterprise Architects
Platforming & Tooling Expert
Governance

10. Identifying key stakeholders (continued)
Start Collaborating
Determining key technology stakeholders
One on one meetings to discuss issues, develop consensus for the approach with key stakeholders (confirm stakeholder-ship or get recommendations, repeat if necessary with appropriate stakeholders)
Obtain commitment to support effort, to be or send representatives
Determine specific individuals to participate
Right people from the right organizations within the Enterprise
They know how the organization functions
Ability to determine transition path
Decision authority on behalf of their organization
Ability to communicate and excite their organization

11. Identifying strategies to overcome knowledge gaps and inertia
First identify the objectives:
Light weight integrate
Integrated with existing organization
Limit creating new committees or governance bodies
Define process to use to develop consensus
Baseline existing governance
Integrate new governance into existing IT Governance
Workshop format
Present high level “strawman” of entry points and processes
Lead group through thought processes and use cases to develop governance

12. Workshop Format – The Tool for Developing Organizational Concurrence
SOA Concepts
Service Definitions
SOA Specific Roles and Responsibilities
SOA Tools (Registry / Repository/ etc.)
SOA Use Cases
Enterprise Life Cycle processes
ELC Roles and Responsibilities
Policies
ELC Artifacts
Identify the actors
Identify the roles and responsibilities
Identify new and changed processes
Identify the policies
Identify Services Attributes for the Service Registry
Preparation for Integrated Governance Workshops
Gather SOA Specific Information
Gather Existing Lifecycle and Governance Information
Integrated Governance Workshops
Discussion of what happens at each stage for each use case
There are two key areas to focus on in preparation for the Integrated Workshops: SOA Specific preparation and Existing ELC preparation.
The first area is SOA Specific Knowledge. This information will be new to most of the participants. It is important that you will be able to provide and instruct the participants on the SOA Concepts, Roles and Tools that are involved in SOA. At the IRS, we used our existing experience we had gathered via our PoC work with services and wrote a whitepaper that helped clarify roles and responsibilities. This was able to facilitate the discussions in our Integrated Workshops.
The second area to concentrate on is the existing ELC and Governance that is already in place. This is crucial. Most people do not know the full ELC processes. They know where they intersect with it. Additionally, in order to understand and be able to integrate all of the SOA Touch Points, as well as to be able to make authoritative recommendations on how to modify it, it is important to have the full, documented process. To prep for these workshops, you might want to arrange Just In Time training, or set up other knowledge transfer sessions.
Once you have adequately prepared, you will want to schedule your workshops with the participants. You will not be able to address all issues within a single workshop. At the IRS, we scheduled four to drill down all six of our life cycle stages (Service Identification, Service Re-Use, Service Design, Service Compliance and Validation, Service Development/testing, and Service Deployment)
During the workshops, you will need to…
Identify the actors
Identify the roles and responsibilities
Identify new and changed processes
Identify the policies
Identify Services Attributes for the Service Registry
One of the easiest ways to do this is to step through each of the use cases. Identify who should be involved in each step, who is responsible, what type of information will be needed, what types of decisions will be required and who can make them, etc.
Common Services Life Cycle - Service Identification, Service Re-Use, Service Design, Service Compliance and Validation, Service Development / Testing, and Service Deployment

13. Strawman Models – see appendix for full size examples

14. Achieving Common Services Governance through Organizational Concurrence provides
Organizational Buy-In to a process that they helped develop
A governance process that is reasonable, integrated into the existing proven processes
Common Services
Platforms & Tools
Governance
Enterprise
Architecture
Guidance
Center of
Excellence
Design Patterns
Messaging
SOA Principles
SOA Roadmap

15. Q & A Panelist Sam Kneppar Sam.Kneppar@irs.gov
Kimberly Rabe
Frank Tirado

16. Appendix – Workshop Strawman The IRS Services Life Cycle

17. Appendix – Workshop Strawman The IRS’ Role and Responsibilities during a services life cycle

18. Appendix – The IRS’ Strawman Use Cases examples

19. Service Opportunity Identified
Appendix – Workshop Strawman The IRS’ Strawman Use Cases examples (continued)
ELC
Yes No
Service Opportunity Identified