Get SOA Policy Management Right

IT leaders must understand the general characteristics of the SOA policy life cycle. This will help you to watch over critical control points and organizational relationships. Here's some practical advice from Forrester Research SOA expert Randy Heffner. SOA policy management is an advanced means of building flexibility and business value into service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy. SOA policy is emerging as a feature in many types of SOA related products, and your architects should have it on their radar screens. If it sneaks into your SOA strategy without a clear plan, your organization may paint itself into a corner and miss important opportunities to achieve SOA policy benefits.

SOA policies are defined separately from the SOA-based services they control, which allows flexibility in different domains of service characteristics ranging from business operations (monetary limits, transaction routing, etc.), service-level management, deploy controls, security, and more. SOA policy management adds value in two ways: 1) it allows your SOA-based services to change more quickly in response to business changes, and 2) it extends and reinforces your SOA governance processes during both development and production operation, resulting in more reliable and efficient SOA operations.

From your perspective as the CIO or IT leader, it is important to understand the general characteristics of the policy life cycle, which will help you to watch over critical control points and organizational relationships. Key characteristics of getting the SOA policy life cycle right include:

Getting a clear connection with the original source of the policy. Every policy has at least one original source within the organization-a person or team that directly cares about, is responsible for, or is affected by the policy. Your policy management processes must have appropriate integration points and approval checkpoints with these varied original policy sources.

Elaborating policy from the general to the specific. In the early stages of the SOA service life cycle, a policy may be specified in a more general, abstract way, but your SOA platform can only enforce that policy when it is rendered in a concrete, executable form. The policy life cycle, including policy authoring and management tools, will control the transformation and/or translation from abstract to concrete policy-and ensure traceability between the source and the final implementation.

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