Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

Preface

I began this book with a lofty goal: to clarify and simplify the concepts of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) governance such that organizations could understand the breadth, richness, and scope of SOA governance in the context of their entire enterprise. As SOA interest and adoption has accelerated rapidly despite still being in its infancy as a discipline, the challenges of governance have risen to the fore across the entire industry. Absent a governance model, SOA adoption will be stilted and hampered by a lack of engagement with key enterprise stakeholders in the important decisions and management processes that will help ensure business value through SOA. This exposes one of the Catch 22s of SOA—SOA governance is critical to SOA success, yet SOA governance is very challenging in and of itself, so much so that, to their peril, organizations may choose to avoid confronting the governance issue. This possibility would represent a major lost opportunity for any organization. After all, could it be that the ultimate value of implementing SOA in your enterprise is that you implement an appropriate enterprise governance model as a result? Imagine, we started out doing SOA and ended up fixing our enterprise governance along the way.

I will also confess that this has been the most challenging book project I have undertaken. Governance is a complex topic, fraught with organizational impacts far and wide depending on what you are governing and how you want to govern. And ...