Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

4.4. POLICY MODEL

SOA goals, principles, and policies are the beginning of your SOA governance model design process. In order for any governance to be effective, you must establish the policies that will be enforced in order to govern key processes. No policies, no governance. Without policies, it may be possible to achieve visibility and information sharing around certain governance domains. With policies, you can clearly define the parameters for all key governance concerns, and then enforce conformance to them. Policies, however, must be within the context of the organization's business, IT, and SOA goals. Policies are expressions and reflections of organizational intent, and thus must derive from the strategic intent of management. Bridging the gap between strategy and goals to actionable policies are SOA principles. Principles are essentially aspirational statements that reflect strategy and goals and facilitate decision making.

Chapter 6 provides a detailed overview of goals, principles, and policies, so we will not repeat them here. Suffice to say that your SOA goals, principles, and policies are the foundation on which you will structure your SOA governance model.

We will focus here on an interesting aspect of policies, and that is the decision around what policy enforcement mechanism should be utilized. The goals, principles, and policies process can be summarized as follows:

• Define business, IT, and SOA goals (from SOA strategy document, if it exists).

• Identify IT and ...