Multiple Personalities of SOA Governance

Two roads diverged…^[1]

Not a typical shrink's couch

In an earlier post, I asked a question: “is Governance worth the trouble?” and left a cliffhanger for an answer that it depends on how one looks at it. Today, I will try to untangle the issue further. But first let’s look at the diagnosis. Imagine yourself as a psychiatrist who encounters a patient that exhibits the following symptoms:

1. is perceived very differently by different observers
2. exhibit drastically different behaviors under identical circumstances
3. possesses some advanced capabilities one day and completely lacks them the next
4. radically changes the ways in which it relates to and interacts with the others

If you are an American^[2], you will undoubtedly diagnose the patient with the Multiple Personalities Disorder. Wouldn’t you agree that all of the above apply to SOA Governance? I admit that at some point the parallels end: there was no documented early abuse, hypnosis or memory loss, but in my book there are enough similarities, to warrant looking at Governance from this angle. And, as in real life, the doctor needs to identify, isolate and unravel each of the personalities before they can make progress with their patient, let’s try the same approach with ours. Now that we’ve got Governance comfortable on our couch, let us start with the history…

Not means of transportation

I remember attending a webinar, where Anne Thomas Manes, the recognized matriarch of SOA Governance, was warming up the crowd for a pitch by HP/Systinet, where she used to be the CTO. She started by saying “SOA Governance is about risk mitigation” which almost made me to do the Parisian Tailor (leave), but instead got me thinking. She is the one of the most recognized authorities in the field, so she can’t be wrong. Yet how could she be right, and talking about the same Governance to which I have dedicated the last several years of my career? Imagine yourself hearing one of the German car manufacturers to say: “Automobile is a means of ground transportation" – hard to argue with, true, yet somehow completely unfathomable. But there is a number of car companies, that live and compete (although perhaps not with the Germans) by that formula. That is when the idea for this article first hatched. Perhaps the theological disputes about the nature of Governance (how many policies can dance on the head of a PEP?) miss the point that the latter presents different personalities to different observers.

Construction workers

In my professional observation I identified two distinct personalities, which I named the Hauler and the Builder as a reference to one of my favourite parables attributed to Roberto Assagioli. In it a traveller walked past a construction site and saw three men doing the same work. He stopped and asked them: what are you doing? The first one replied – “Hauling stones”. The second – “Earning a living”, and the third one – “Building a Temple”. When I ran a recruitment operation, I used to tell it to some of the candidates when critiquing the resumes and discussing interviewing techniques. The diagram below illustrates how the two personalities manifest themselves to the main constituencies: technology vendors and customers.

Customer	Builder		Vendor
	Strategic Transforming Services into Business Assets; Building Enterprise-grade SOA Ecosystem;	Offensive Delivering on the original SOA promise; Creating strategic opportunities;
	Tactical Adding Security, Logging, etc. to web services; Virtualizing endpoints; Creating System of record;	Defensive Closing gaps in product lines; Checking off the boxes on RFPs Placating the analysts;
Point of View	Hauler		Point of View

If I had to summarize each personality in a single word, Builder would be transformative and Hauler – incremental. Not that there is something wrong with the latter: both represent steps into the right direction, and any kind of improvement is way better then none.

Now, when we have identified the personalities we can analyze them in a bit more detail. Builder is a visionary and likes to relate to the same: given a choice she would go straight to the CIO/CTO. Hauler is a pragmatist, and prefers those who would benefit immediately: operations, security, etc. Builder tries to emphasize flexibility and potential, while Hauler concentrates on convenience and stability (often coming as an appliance). Builder is a generalist, trying to address all aspects of Governance in the broadest possible sense, Hauler usually tries to narrow down the problem, do one thing and do it well. Builder likes to talk about business challenges and opportunities; Hauler concentrates on technical capabilities and supported standards. Builders often see themselves as unique and irreplaceable, while Haulers tend to seek strength numbers and form or join all kinds of unions.

In retrospect it makes sense that Anne Thomas Manes chose the Hauler, when she introduced Systinet, who is the perceived leader amongst Service Registries, and thus most interested in maintaining status quo. This leads us to the final question: which of the two you (as a customer, or perhaps, a vendor) should be dealing with? The answer, as always, is highly individual but for me it feels too crowded on the Hauler’s side. And we can easy guess whose pay is better

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¹ This is a re-post of an rticle originally published on Jun 27, 2008 on my old Sun blog.

² Until very recently, the phenomenon whose proper name is Dissociative Identity Disorder was almost exclusively confined to North America.