Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

6.3. SOA GOVERNANCE GOALS

SOA goals come from the SOA strategy and serve as the master compass for the SOA governance model. These goals directly inform how SOA governance must be implemented to support them. We find this essential alignment and mapping is often missing in SOA governance projects, which leads to a focus on technical governance challenges at the expense of business and process policies. SOA goals must represent and reflect business goals. The following sample of business goals are often cited in informal or formal SOA strategy documents:

• Become an agile business.

• Maximize revenues and profits.

• Reduce time to market for products, services or capabilities.

• Develop a holistic view of the customer.

• Present a singular view of the company to customers.

These business goals become the substrate for formulating the following SOA governance goals:

• Increase Agility. We must improve its ability to support new products and services. This requires implementing real-time event driven SOA-enabled processes supported by a flexible SOA. It means shedding legacy heritage systems through an aggressive application rationalization program. Finally, it means enabling our information assets to support SOA and data services.

• Emphasize Enterprise Architecture. Establish enterprise architecture processes to deliver an enterprise view of business, technology, and resources to enable a decision support mechanism for internal and external business and technology communities.

• Rationalize, Reuse, ...