Application Architecture for the Enterprise

Governance 2.0

According to tradition, John Soyring, a VP at IBM, gave the keynote at CSS this morning and did not disappoint.  John toured a wide variety of disruptive influences on the current technology market - the first baby boomers turning 60 this year, the voracious appetite that developing economies (China and India receiving key mention) have for raw materials, and all of the * 2.0 disrupters.

He spoke a lot about SOA governance which is of current interest to me, but imagine my surprise when he also brought up long tails as a target of enterprise interest, which is a declared interest of mine.  He also covered mashups as a key enterprise intiative, and posited it as the business end of SOA (my words, not his).  I was reminded of Brenda's Office 2.0 podcast.

I asked a question about how traditional enterprise governance practices will need to change from what was needed to manage a portfolio of software assets to practices for managing services and mashup components.  John and his colleague David Barnes actually had refreshingly good answers to that.  They talked about the importance of managing services for shareability and enhanceability.  But they also talked frankly about the fact that mashups are often on the experimental end of the spectrum and that part of improved governance is going to have to be around learning to harvest enterprise-quality assets from the mashup incubators.  Embrace the enterprise incubators rather than scold them.

posted by scott @ 3:52 PM