In this post we look at how the 3 Cs of an enterprise service governance (compliance, consistency, and completeness) can be enabled and utilized for multiple roles: Leadership, Product Owners, Developers, and Business Analysts. Doing so ensures your portfolio of APIs, Events, and Services are high quality, reliable, and reusable, and helps facilitate differentiation, digital recombination, and enterprise IT for your organization.
The ignite Governance Pamphlet
When we talk about Enterprise Service Governance with Customers and Partners, there is commonality that is always highlighted. There are processes and standards set in the organization for governance, but no two implementations are completely alike.
So, from the perspective of Solution Engineering, our first job when discussing this topic is to understand and identify how the enterprise has approached the many levels of standardization, governance of services, lifecycle, and their peripherals.
To simplify, we can break that down into three buckets: Compliance, Consistency, Completeness. These allow us to speak clearly to Leadership, Product Owners, Developers, and Business Analysts about the functional marriage that is created between organization levels with good governance practices, and the benefits that are derived through layered governance in ignite. Governance is a subset of the greater product, yes and often looked at as a “hand-break”.
However, when utilized properly, governance is a cornerstone factor in allowing innovation in your organization. Some questions to keep in mind as we dive deeper:
- How accessible are we to customers and partners?
- How smooth are relationships and processes between development teams?
- How quickly can we get from acquisition to co-development?
- Can my team build consistently 100% of the time?
- Can we with certainty, reuse what has been created by other teams?
Now to uncover the three C’s!
Enterprise Service Governance Area 1: API, Event, and Service Compliance
Leaders, Product Owners, and Developers alike must follow standards for the work that they are undertaking.
Imagine now that as a Leader, I can define process for my Product Owners ensuring that what is delivered is always in accordance with a standard that is clearly defined in one source. Sounds like less headaches for me!
Now as a Product Owner, I can define a process to “see and approve” work in accordance with Leadership level rules to manage the efforts of the Developers. As a Product Owner I can see very clearly where the Developers are.
Then we have the Developers, that can establish service level governance that ensures services follow a development standard from Design, build, deploy. Rather, this is baked in as part of the process. Allowing development teams to truly move quickly because the standards are the process.
Lastly, we can think of the Business Analyst that would certainly want to get a view into all the past, present, and future development details. Allowing those to be able to provide their insights. Well good news, with ignite it can all now be hosted in the same place, broken out into clearly defined sections so that each layer of governance is understandable & easily configurable, now and in the future.
Enterprise Service Governance Area 2: API, Event, and Service Consistency
Compliance is a great segway into Consistency! Rather than an afterthought, let us consider a much more modern, baked-in approach, and the value that it brings- starting with the capability to define how services exist through their lifecycle.
Developers can make certain they are consistently developing quality APIs, Services and Events. Proactive governance can reduce redundancy and increase efficiency by notifying the Developer/Product Owner in each step of the Design/Build/Deploy process of what needs to be done to achieve a qualified state of the service. Those same consistency principles can be applied to the views Leadership will look at for Product Owners, as well as the views that are important to the Business Analysts. We call this “assisted normalization”.
Enterprise Service Governance Area 3: API, Event, and Service Completeness
Heading for home-plate we have Completeness. It is the culmination of Compliance and Consistency in a good governance model that allows us to understand completeness of our APIs, Events, and Services.
This can be represented through Lifecycle State, Passing Governance, Approval for Reuse, the options are polymorphic and limitlessly configurable to the organization based on its needs. Simply, with a process in place, we can solidify a model for determining completeness. This will allow for clear understanding between business units in the organization regarding our APIs, Events, Services, and so-on.
The Results!
As a Result, the lives of our Business Analysts, Developers, Product Owners, and Leadership are made much easier, by giving each the ability to see and show where they are and where they intend on going in the process.
On top of that we have a built in and configurable governance model that is communicating with us from Design, to Build, to Deploy and protecting us from sub-quality work at each stage based on rules that fit our organization. Talk about building blocks for a harmonious, agile, and empowered working environment between Teams!
Moreover, the tracks for momentum are now laid out. Think back to the questions at the front-end of the article. These are the focal points for leadership that are seeking to disrupt markets, invest in, and invent new solutions. Solutions that can be delivered to the market quickly with consistency. Solutions built between teams and partners that are insured with compliance. Solutions that speak their value through identifiable and understandable cues for completeness.
What was once looked at as in obstacle by the organization becomes a key element to unlocking the force-multiplier that lives in ignite’s ability to enable: Differentiation, Recombination, and Enterprise IT. Truly overhauling how organization look at their service processes. …and in this article, we are only talking about governance! Much more is offered in the Holistic Catalog and how we support Enterprise Teams with the greater ignite Platform!
