Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

3.6. SUMMARY

The Four-Tier View of the SOA Governance Reference Model helps operationalize the concepts of SOA governance in relation to other enterprise and IT governance processes. The Expanded Four-Tier View provides additional detail as to critical governance focal points for the assessment and development of your enterprise SOA governance model. What should be clear is that SOA imposes and extends many enterprise and IT governance processes in order to manage the complexity of SOA and services. The SOA Operating Model Governance tier is meant to explicitly add SOA-specific extensions to IT governance. Over time, these processes will mature into steady state processes, and may even be reabsorbed into enterprise and IT governance processes. In our view, that is what we expect to happen as SOA becomes the de facto model for IT delivery in global enterprises. The Four-Tier Model will help you inventory your existing governance processes and capabilities, map those to various enterprise and IT governance processes, and determine what critical gaps must be closed to realistically implement SOA governance.

The processes we have described may be too fine-grained for your enterprise, or you may add new ones to augment our list. Regardless, enterprise SOA governance demands a holistic enterprise approach, while focusing on the key processes that will enable your SOA efforts to produce business value. Do not be intimidated by these processes. Focus on the few core processes that are ...