INDUSTRY

IBM today announced new software and services to help organizations capture best practices and IT assets, allowing them to more easily integrate their business processes and information assets across the enterprise. Called Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Governance, the new portfolio helps businesses address the unique concerns that arise when adopting an SOA infrastructure, including measuring business goals, aligning IT to meet those goals, and tracking business performance. Comprised of best practices, processes and new software, IBM's SOA Governance portfolio helps customers establish tailored decision rights in the organization and implement the policy, measurement and control mechanisms necessary to carry out those decisions. Effective governance helps free teams from the uncertainties and challenges of trying to figure out who needs to agree on what so they can focus on creating and delivering innovative business solutions. A recent study from IT analyst research firm, Gartner, confirmed the need for governing an SOA environment. "In 2006, lack of working governance mechanisms in midsize-to-large (fewer than 50 services) post-pilot SOA projects will be the most common reason for project failure (0.8 probability)." The new IBM SOA Governance portfolio draws upon IBM's experience in helping hundreds of customers improve their governance approaches and use SOA to meet business goals. To help govern their SOA, customers can choose from numerous IBM offerings, including the recently announced IBM Workplace for Business Strategy Execution to help customers measure performance of their business strategy. "IBM is making business flexibility through SOA governance a reality for our customers," said Danny Sabbah, general manager, Rational Software, IBM. "We have the tools, templates, experience and methodologies to help bring business and IT stakeholders into a productive discussion." New IBM offerings include: - SOA Governance and Management Method -- The new SOA Governance and Management Method will be available through IBM Business Consulting Services. Nearly 500 consultants will be trained and available to help customers map their requirements, policies, procedures and regulations to execute new business plans based on SOA, and help with the necessary cultural changes. - SOA Governance plug-in for IBM Rational Method Composer -- select governance best practices from IBM Business Consulting Services are packaged as a reusable asset and delivered as part of Rational Method Composer. The governance approach delivered with Rational Method Composer can be customized to reflect an organization's unique requirements. When used with IBM Rational Portfolio Manager, IBM's project and portfolio management software, the governance process becomes more automated. - IBM Rational Data Architect -- helps customers adopt and enforce corporate and industry standards on their data models, and helps customers design, discover and govern SOA compliant information architectures. - IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database -- automatically discovers and manages information about a client's IT environment, including IT resources, configuration items, user identities, and the interrelationships between these entities. - IBM WebSphere Service Registry and Repository -- available later this year, this offering will help customers discover, access, and manage service metadata used in the selection, invocation, management, reuse and governance of services in an SOA. This delivers strong governance capabilities for the publication, discovery, subscription, management and policy enforcement of SOA services and assets. In addition to 500 consultants available to help customers govern their SOA, nearly 90,000 IBM Business Consulting Services employees will be trained to help customers realize business benefits from SOA. "For an SOA to be successful, business leaders need to join the discussion," said Michael Liebow, vice president of SOA and Web Services, IBM Business Consulting Services. "This concentrated focus on SOA governance is an important first step to getting business leaders engaged in the discussion. The team of consultants and the SOA governance method being announced today, as well as the SOA training across IBM, will bring business leaders to the table and result in a unified business and IT alignment strategy. For more information on IBM's SOA Governance solution, visit its Web site.