The Criteria for Comprehensive SOA Governance
It’s a mistake for organizations to discount governance as something that’s optional, nice to have, or a later-phase aspect of SOA. Governance must begin with the initial SOA deployment, providing the framework, processes, and practices for scaling out a healthy and efficient SOA. An organization can’t simply back into governance down the road once an SOA implementation has reached a new level of maturity. In the context of SOA, governance doesn’t follow success; governance begets success.

SOA governance must focus on establishing a framework for assuring service quality and engendering trust between service providers and consumers as both individual services – and the service network as a whole – progress through their life cycles. Without strategies or infrastructure for governance in place organizations will hit roadblocks as they try to advance their SOA initiatives.

We’ve identified three broad criteria for comprehensive SOA governance:

Engaging the Organization
Governance needs to have teeth, and needs organizational buy-in. Creating a SOA Center of Excellence is practical way to integrate a program for SOA governance, quality, and management with lifecycle services to plan, assess, implement, and manage your SOA initiative. It unites key business and IT stakeholders in a decision-making body and provides a mechanism for instilling consistency and control. It provides methodologies, expertise, and a common set of tools to support a standardized SOA infrastructure, encourage and enforce new development methods and operational procedures, and monitor SOA adoption, service utilization, and overall business outcomes.

Once established, the SOA Center of Excellence assumes full responsibility for supporting SOA initiatives – from strategic planning to SOA infrastructure and operations – as you:

• Standardize the SOA infrastructure, development methods and operational procedures
• Develop a reference architecture, service characteristics, patterns, and SOA blueprint
• Leverage new and existing SOA expertise across the organization
• Deliver an SOA roadmap for management and technical tracks
• Stay current with the latest technologies and techniques
• Establish an SOA program and create metrics, dashboards, and checklists to measure efficiency
• Promote high-quality, cost-effective timely services by applying consistent SOA methodologies and techniques
• Apply enabling technologies to enable SOA governance, quality and management

Best Practices Automation
SOA is about embracing heterogeneity, leveraging resources, and exploiting existing IT assets. It’s not about rip-and-replace. It doesn’t require that everything be done one way using one set of technologies. However, it does require a robust foundation to ensure visibility, trust, and control for SOA governance and to automate and manage governance processes.

At a minimum, SOA governance requires creating a system-of-record that provides a canonical source for all information about services. It requires a way to manage the full lifecycle of services, and engage service providers and consumers so they can contract and agree on how services will be reused. It requires a means of managing business and IT policies, associating them with the right services, and enforcing them at runtime. Governance technologies will necessarily be used across the organization by developers creating services, enterprise architects managing processes, and by business consumers of services: they must provide meaningful information and insight to each of these different stakeholders.

Support for the Extended Enterprise
One of the promised benefits of SOA is its ability to bridge technological and business process divides that separate business units, partners, the supply chain, and customers – the “extended enterprise.” For this to be realized, SOA governance must be middleware and platform-independent to support heterogeneous IT. This requires an open, standards-based approach to the way governance solutions share information and interoperate with other SOA technologies. SOA governance can’t be tied to a single vendor’s “stack.” Standards and specifications that support an ecosystem of products and supported technologies make SOA governance easier to implement, integrate, and extend as adoption accelerates.

As organizations assess how to begin their SOA transformations, a compelling place to concentrate is the governance domain. By establishing a governance foundation that engages with the organization, provides best practices automation, and offers support for the extended enterprise, gaining measurable business outcomes from SOA initiatives is much more likely.