Lee Thé recenctly posted an article on SOA Governance based on coverage from the Enterprise Architecture Practioners Conference held last month in San Francisco. The article is an interesting conversation on how governance, EA, and SOA either work or fail together in todays enterprise IT space.
One of my favorite qoutes from the article was from Kyle Gabhart, director of the SOA technology division at Web Age Solution. When asked about how to make governance and reusability happen:
"Gabhart joked -- sort of -- that "the most effective governance tools I know are Excel and Visio." He said you have to build a dialogue about how to adapt/change/mold SOA to navigate the political structures, the people and the resources, using wikis, whiteboards, whatever it takes to foster that discussion. He added that a lot of valuable items are not reusable, such as paper plates, paper diapers and foam cups." - (Source: SOA Governance: 'Not Much' Success, Panelists Say, Application Development Trends, Feb 14, 2008)
I go through A LOT of diapers in my house and god knows that they are the last thing that I would consider reusable. Although paper plates are one of those things where I wonder if it takes less energy to manufacture and recycle 100 paper plates or run one load in the dishwasher?