24 February 2007 - 20:15SOA - it’s more about service management

I was reading this article on infoQ about service registries. I was struck by the end paragraph:
I periodically get to attend meetings where someone has a vision which involves a single registry/repository to rule them all. There follows a list of all the great metadata which this single truth will “own”. Usually a can’t hear what they’re saying due to the sound of “Darth Vader’s Theme” trumpeting in my lugholes. Empire building.. Empire building ..
This is a pretty fine note about an uber-centralized organization, one that is controlling its entire IT environment from a single command and control center. Which is probably not very efficient because not all services are enterprise-wide and we should not have everything available to everybody (available means available after security checks). Enterprise-wide services - the tax service (*), for example - should be part of this uber-repository, but fine grained services should not. Services particular to a BU or series of BU should not make it into this uber-repository either, but rather in repositories dedicated to them and their partners.
More and more I get the impression that SOA is a lot less about Service Architecture than it is about Service Management. Governance, registries, policy management, etc…, these are simply the means to an end. The current mind-set seems to be that the best way to manage these services is by centralizing them in order to break the IT silos which each BU has created over the years as part of its operations. You need centralized control in order to identify redundant IT functionality and in order to agree on what sub-set of that functionality will be available to all the parties, I agree with this. But I also think that you should recognize the core competencies of each BU and delegate it the ownership of the IT service enabling that core competency. These IT services would be considered BU-specific and should be treated differently from enterprise-wide services (**).

* The tax service: When talking about an enterprise-wide service I usually give the example of a tax service that computes the taxes in a financial institution. Pretty much every transaction executed by all the systems of that financial institution in all the BUs needs to be taxed which raises the need for a taxation enterprise-wide service.

** A BU-specific service may evolve into an enterprise-wide service if the demand for its functionality make it necessary. One important difference between an enterprise-wide service and a BU-specific service is that the enterprise-wide service evolves pretty slowly, every change requiring agreement from a large number of actors.

Later Edit: Service management is essentially a study into the interactions between various various BUs in a large organization. These interactions will then be displayed in the interactions between the BUs’ IT environments.