Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

10.2. GOVERNANCE BEYOND POLICIES AND EDICTS

Another idea we want to leave you with is that governance does not have to be a checks and balances mechanism or an enterprise policing process. Governance can be implemented in ways that make it more of a value-added and collaborative process. In this model, governance is far more than a policing function. Governance must be an educational and behavioral guidance process as well. Prescriptive SOA governance can only get the governance transformation started, but prescriptive policy enforcement does not scale well. Top-down policy enforcement in a command hierarchy environment can work for narrowly-scoped mission critical requirements, but for larger organizations with the wide-ranging governance requirements demanded by SOA, command hierarchy governance must be augmented by collaborative, community and related bottom-up and middle-out governance engagement mechanisms. Culture and behavior guided by community norms rather than top-down edicts scale extremely well. Thus, SOA governance must transition as quickly as possible to a normative behavioral model from the prescriptive policy model we espouse initially. These governance styles are not mutually exclusive either.