Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

2.4. SOA ENVIRONMENTAL DIMENSIONS

The last major category of SOA governance includes the environmental determinants of effective governance. These include SOA funding and budgeting, governance performance management, and governance enabling technology and implementation. These are environmental considerations because they in many ways shape the effectiveness of the other dimensions of the SOA Governance Reference Model. Questions to consider include the following:

What management processes are required to gauge and assess governance performance? How do we evolve our governance as we mature our SOA efforts? How can we reinforce governance with appropriate budgeting and funding practices that support sharing and reuse of services and other corporate assets? How do we manage, version, and deprecate business and technical policies that help us govern what must be governed?

2.4.1. SOA Funding and Budgeting

Strategic planning, program planning, and funding and budgeting processes are strategic activities that are often not managed strategically in many organizations. This is one of the ironies we find in helping organizations establish governance models. Many strategic planning exercises are not very strategic, and thus the resultant IT funding and budgeting activities are handicapped and focused on tactical versus strategic horizons.

SOA funding and budgeting is a root cause dimension of SOA and SOA Governance and one that typically is very challenging to address. Any time you make ...