SOA Governance

SOA governance is a concept used for activities related to exercising control over services in service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions. One viewpoint, from IBM and others, is that SOA governance is an extension (subset) of IT governance which itself is an extension of corporate governance. The implicit assumption in this view is that services created as part of SOA solutions are just one more type of IT asset in need of governance, with the corollary that SOA governance does not apply to IT assets that are "not SOA". A contrasting viewpoint, expressed by blogger Dave Oliver and others, is that service orientation provides a broad organising principle for all aspects of IT in an organisation — including IT governance. Hence SOA governance is nothing but IT governance informed by SOA principles.

The focus of SOA governance is on those resources to be leveraged for Service Oriented Computing to deliver value to the business. SOA solutions require a number of IT support processes as well as organizational processes that will also involve the business leaders. SOA needs a solid foundation that is based on standards and includes policies, contracts, and service level agreements. The IT community is expected to use services to quickly automate new and changing business processes. To do so, services should be produced with several design qualities, such as composability, loose-coupling, autonomy, data representation standardization. In addition, a SOA governance infrastructure should be in place to support the service delivery life-cycle, which includes a registry of services to enable service discovery. Consequently, SOA increases the need for good governance as it will help assign decision-making authorities, roles, and responsibilities and bring focus to the organizational capabilities needed to be successful.

The definitions of SOA governance agree in its purpose of exercising control, but differ in the responsibilities it should have. Some narrow definitions focus on imposing policies and monitoring services, while other definitions use a broader business-oriented perspective.

Anne Thomas Manes defines governance as: “The processes that an enterprise puts in place to ensure that things are done [...] in accordance with best practices, architectural principles, government regulations, laws, and other determining factors. SOA governance refers to the processes used to govern adoption and implementation of SOA.”

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