Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

10.3. EVOLVING GOVERNANCE: POLICIES TO NORMS TO CULTURE

As governance processes and capabilities mature, and especially as SOA gains more momentum across large enterprises, the scalability of governance models will be challenged. Scaling governance will be a mid- to long-term requirement, and planning for enterprise-scale implementations of governance policies and policy enforcement mechanisms—organizations, processes and technologies—is going to be essential. This calls into question how an organization can scale governance for an enterprise.

The answer is simple and profound. In order to scale governance, governance must become the culture and normative model of enterprise behavior. Culture scales very well, based on norms and expectations and community models of governance. Explicit policy enforcement is more difficult to scale, particularly for an enterprise. The goal is to establish a body of policies that can become norms through community adoption via educational and awareness activities.

The following characteristics define the ultimate evolution of governance into a normative model:

• Policies transform into behavioral norms.

• Governance boards evolve into exception management teams; their policy definition role becomes a community process.

• Rigid policy engines and repositories are augmented and then ultimately replaced by dynamic collaboration governance tools, chat rooms, virtual boards, and community policy oversight models.

• Penalties and nonconformance are replaced by encouragement ...