Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

6.6. SOA GOVERNANCE POLICIES

As stated earlier, policies are the means by which governance is operationalized. Policies are what make a governance model tangible, enforceable, and meaningful for the stakeholders of an SOA. They are what puts 'teeth' in governance from an enforcement and conformance perspective.

Your policies are ultimately expressions of how you will achieve SOA business value for your organization. Policies translate business objectives from your SOA strategy into actionable guidance, principles, rules, and enforcement such that you have a better likelihood of achieving your business goals. SOA policies begin and end with business policies, even though some eventually become fine-grained technical policies. They all ultimately map into the business context and goals of your SOA initiative.

SOA policies are a major source of industry confusion given the relative immaturity and lack of standards, as well as general confusion over runtime governance and design-time governance. And what about the lack of corporate governance policy and guidance standards? In this chapter, we will develop a unified policy model to clarify the concept of policies in SOA governance. We hope to set in motion efforts to standardize the integration of business and process policies with technical and security policies.