Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

Chapter 9. SOA Governance Enabling Technology and Tools

Governance is defined as the policies, rules, and regulations under which an organization functions as well as the processes that are put in place to ensure compliance with those policies, rules, and regulations. Recall our definition of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) governance from Chapter 1:

• SOA governance is the definition, implementation, and ongoing execution of a SOA stakeholder decision model and accountability framework that ensures an organization is pursuing an appropriate SOA strategy aligned with Information Technology (IT) and business goals, and is executing that strategy in accordance with guidelines and constraints defined by a body of SOA principles and policies.

• SOA policies are enforced through various policy enforcement mechanisms such as governance boards and committees, governance processes, checkpoints and reviews, and governance enabling technology and tools.

This chapter is focused on the SOA governance enabling technology and tools that implement and enforce SOA policies across the services lifecycle, from design time, through quality assurance and test, to publishing, and discovery and consumption and the transition into run time and operations. There are many tools on the market that claim to have a role in SOA governance. You will be able to validate their claims using the concepts in this chapter.