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When building out a SOA, a bottom-up governance approach focuses on integrating services around individual ESBs that can be quickly assembled. The approach has been criticized for requiring excessive updates and rework later on. Meanwhile, an opposing "top-down" governance approach involves extensive planning and strict policy enforcement. This app... roach has been faulted for taking much more time to produce results. Like it or not, there is always a bit of messiness to the way enterprises deploy IT and build applications, said Mahau Ma, VP of Marketing at open source middleware maker MuleSoft. This suggests that enterprise architects really cannot plan for all eventualities but that they actually can stunt growth with rigid top-down SOA programs. "Any time you've got to spend seven figures on software licenses, roll it out for 24 months and hope you get a big return on the back end, it never seems to pan out that way," said Ma. "You'd like to think there's some architect in the sky that's perfectly planning things out, but from our standpoint that doesn't seem to be reality." MuleSoft, makers of the Mule ESB, recently released management tools said to support the bottom-up approach to SOA management. In turn, top SOA governance tool vendors promote the long view on SOA management. "Building a SOA from the bottom up may work at first, but at some point you're going to have to provide service-level agreements (SLAs) to the business," said Jignesh Shah, VP of business infrastructure products and solutions at Software AG. At that point, he said, an enterprise will need a top-down strategy. "To me, bottom-up is more about everyone in their own silos figuring out what services they should build and then, when needed, they see the opportunity for things like reuse and evolving services," said Shah. "That's a very reactive approach to building out your SOA portfolio." Be careful not to consider the bottom-up approach a type of "real governance," warns Jason Bloomberg, analyst with ZapThink, Inc. Governance means ...Read More