Web 2.0 and governance: not an oxymoron?
At the surface, combining Web 2.0 and governance sounds like a complete oxymoron – after all, aren’t mashups, wikis, and all that other hot 2.0 technology about rapid application development being placed in the hands of the end user? What does the G-word have to do with that?
But wait, haven’t we been here before? All those quick-and-dirty VB and Excel-based apps of the past and present living in the nooks and crannies of your enterprise, and the joy of fielding service calls coming into IT complaining that an app, which you know nothing about, stopped working because someone in IT made a change to a data view or API or … that you had no idea was being used by a department you never heard of! Web 2.0 has the potential to repeat this nightmare, with your SOA initiative becoming the hostage. Dion Hinchcliffe’s recent blog on the top ten challenges facing enterprise mashups raises this issue quite coherently, stating “If enterprise mashups unleash hundreds of new applications inside an organization, then who will catalog them, support them, maintain them, and fix them when they break?”
Fighting Web 2.0 technologies is definitely not the right answer – as Joe McKendrick points out, they will happen in your enterprise (and involve your SOA) whether you like it or not, so you’d better get in front of them. And the best way to do this is to bring these business-oriented mashup developers into the big tent of SOA, encouraging them to participate in the process of defining and prioritizing needed services, and to register their use of services so that IT knows who to contact when rev 2 (or 3, or …) of those services needs to be deployed and prior versions retired. In other words, governance. But Web 2.0 governance needs to be lightweight and seamless to mashup developers or they’ll simply work around it, and they also need to gain more than they lose from participating. A well-designed development-time services repository/registry with integrated governance and an easy-to-use front end to find interesting services will do exactly that. It’s the catnip that will help you herd those Web 2.0 cats, or at least keep track of their general whereabouts.
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