Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

10.10. SEPARATION OF ENTERPRISE AND IT GOVERNANCE FROM THE PMO

Another recent trend we have seen in the field is the separation of IT governance from the program management office (PMO) function within the IT organization and its establishment as a separate dedicated governance function directly reporting to the CIO. This organizational positioning of IT governance clearly signals the strategic importance of governance and positions it as an authoritative function within the enterprise. This recent trend in no way diminishes the importance of the PMO process in an enterprise. Rather, we feel it enables the PMO to be more focused on its core mission of providing program and project oversight for key enterprise initiatives without being distracted by the additional requirements of SOA governance.

When governance is an outgrowth of the PMO process, its charter can become overly focused on project and program governance with the emphasis being program execution—cost and schedule and scope management issues—as opposed to SOA governance issues. While the PMO function has IT governance roots with its funding oversight role for key enterprise projects, the PMO process is fundamentally different from SOA governance because as we have stated before, SOA governance is a series of cross-cutting oversight processes that govern technical, process and funding and other decisions. The PMO process is inappropriate for this, not because of lack of capabilities, but because its charter is different. ...