Aberdeen Releases Research Report on SOA Governance Progress

iTKO Co-Sponsors Fact-Based Survey Measuring Value of Services-Based Software, you can see the release here. I’m always a bit skeptical about sponsored reports, because they are, well, sponsored. However, some good information nonetheless that I figured I would share.

“iTKO, Inc., a provider of complete automated testing solutions for SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) software, today announced the availability of an Aberdeen Group Research report titled, “Management and Governance: Planning for an Optimized SOA Application Lifecycle.” The research finds that a lack of governance within IT organizations is the chief roadblock to managing an effective SOA strategy. iTKO co-sponsored the research by Aberdeen, a Harte-Hanks Company.”

Initial findings of the survey found that:

“Companies that employ SOA-specific operations automation, and related governance software for automation earlier in the adoption process, consistently achieve much higher value from their SOA investments; ”

I’m not sure about “early adoption” but clearly when using governance you can save some money short and long term, many of my clients are proving that out now.

“About 40 percent of leading or best-in-class organizations have earned paybacks of more than $1 Million on their SOA investments, compared with 14 percent of the entire survey pool. These companies tend to monitor their application development lifecycles more closely than typical enterprises.”

Clear to me that if you leverage tools to assist in driving discipline, you’ll see savings. The trick is the discipline along with the tools.

“Web Services (SOAP/WSDL) enablement alone accounted for less than half of the primary deployment strategies of best-in-class companies.”

Web services are not SOA, that’s clear. They are a single enabling technology, that’s all.

“Lifecycle Quality is a key aspect of SOA Governance, and SOA Testing is important at every stage of adoption to ensure that the resulting services, and their underlying implementation layers, can be trusted for business purposes. At design time, build time and runtime, every layer of distributed SOA architectures must be tested thoroughly. Without visibility into — and enforcement of — the structural integrity, behaviors and performance of the entire system, businesses cannot reap the expected reuse, cost and business agility benefits. ”

Can’t argue with that. Clearly, the notion of governance is sound, and you do indeed need to build some rigor around the design, development, testing, deployment, and management of services. This is a pay me now or pay me later, kind of thing.