Think of Policy as a Process: Policy Lifecycle Management Process
Posted by Gary E Smith - THE SOA NETWORK at Thursday, December 14, 2006 3:40 PM and is filed under Opinion 
Policy Lifecycle Management Process is essentially just another Process!
Think of the management of policies as essentially a process:
In terms of a Policy Lifecycle Management Process the process is made up of: Policy Administration, Policy Deployment, Policy Monitoring, and Policy Enforcement.
If you remember a process is made up of Plan, Do, Check and Correct. So if we overlay the steps of a process on top of the Policy Lifecycle Management Process it looks something like this:
At the beginning of the process, Policies are created (authored) using some kind of development tool then deployed throughout the SOA infrastructure (which could be simply with an enterprise or distributed over a network).
Next think about the idea that the Policy Enforcement Points (PEP) which could again be local or distributed throughout a network and reside on SOA Appliances or a servers within that network. Policies associated with services are stored in Registry/Repositories. As services transit the network the service can be inspected by the PEP and Policies can be enforced (or non-compliances identified). And finally the policies can be monitored and statistics gathered by some kind of management console or network management tool for reporting. At this point the report can be viewed and some corrective action can be taken to modify the policy.
Hopefully that helps you think about how Governance, Compliance, Risk, SLA's and other policies should be managed by your SOA Platform provider. This should also give you a hint where we are headed with Business Process Management (BPM).
Check out my new blog: www.businessprocessarchitect.com
This is a quick overview and I will be talking about this subject in more detail in my upcoming blogs.
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Gary E. Smith
Think of the management of policies as essentially a process:
In terms of a Policy Lifecycle Management Process the process is made up of: Policy Administration, Policy Deployment, Policy Monitoring, and Policy Enforcement.
If you remember a process is made up of Plan, Do, Check and Correct. So if we overlay the steps of a process on top of the Policy Lifecycle Management Process it looks something like this:
At the beginning of the process, Policies are created (authored) using some kind of development tool then deployed throughout the SOA infrastructure (which could be simply with an enterprise or distributed over a network).
Next think about the idea that the Policy Enforcement Points (PEP) which could again be local or distributed throughout a network and reside on SOA Appliances or a servers within that network. Policies associated with services are stored in Registry/Repositories. As services transit the network the service can be inspected by the PEP and Policies can be enforced (or non-compliances identified). And finally the policies can be monitored and statistics gathered by some kind of management console or network management tool for reporting. At this point the report can be viewed and some corrective action can be taken to modify the policy.
Hopefully that helps you think about how Governance, Compliance, Risk, SLA's and other policies should be managed by your SOA Platform provider. This should also give you a hint where we are headed with Business Process Management (BPM).
Check out my new blog: www.businessprocessarchitect.com
This is a quick overview and I will be talking about this subject in more detail in my upcoming blogs.
________________________________________________
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Gary E. Smith
SOA Governance Architect
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