A cohesive approach

The IT industry is full of niche comfort zones. One of the unfortunate consequences of the niche mentality is that the execution management of software is treated as an entirely separate subject from topics such as analysis, design, and software development. While separation of concerns is necessary for specialization and discipline, it becomes unhealthy when important interconnections and relationships between domains of interest are ignored – when separation leads to divorce!

In our present context, this trend surfaces in the separation of SOA from both overall operational management of IT services (in a general sense) and the specific execution management of software services. The consequence of divorcing these subjects is extra painful in the case of services. In particular, if services are to adapt in an on-demand fashion, execution management of the services must ensure that SLAs are satisfied, in compliance with SOA policy, with respect to ever-changing run-time conditions. As we argued in chapter 2, these new challenges call for gear shifts in our approaches to service management, toward SOM: a discipline aimed at ensuring that our architectures (BA and SOA) are not just “theory,” but actually reflected in real production running software services.

SOM is dependent upon good specification of the services that it seeks to regulate. To underline a constant theme of this book: “You can't manage what you don't measure,” but more than that “You can't measure what you don't specify.