Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

9.10. BATTLE FOR CONTROL OF SOA TECHNOLOGY GOVERNANCE

In light of the amount of vendor activity focused on governance, SOA governance is still overly complicated and requires sharp systems engineering skills. Most if not all SOA product vendors claim to deliver or manage some aspect of SOA governance. While their statements are usually true, the lack of an integrated language and enforcement capability continues to exist. We are sure that the various SOA vendors have a role to play in the implementation of policy-driven SOA governance fabric. However, the real question is one of control. Where should SOA governance be controlled, and by what solutions? We believe that there is a need for the creation of a centralized policy management engine where all policies can be defined and then pushed or automatically implemented throughout the infrastructure as determined by the SOA enterprise architects or governance body. These same policy engines must not only have integration points into the runtime environment, but must be integrated into the design-time and publish-and-discovery phases of the Service lifecycle. This approach, which is fundamentally the right one, creates two further SOA governance requirements:

1. SOA policies must be decoupled from the services and not embedded in the implementation of the service.

2. SOA governance must be implemented across multiple technology solutions that maintain control of those SOA life-cycle processes (e.g., services design, publishing/discovery, ...