Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

7.16. SUMMARY

This chapter described various SOA governance organizational design approaches and best practices for planning, staffing, and implementing various types of SOA governance boards in support of your enterprise SOA governance model. We strongly urge you to focus on policies and processes before you define organizational models or implement governance tools. This chapter also developed specific SOA organizational design patterns that align to various stages of SOA and governance maturity. In this chapter, we also discuss the concept of SOA centers of gravity, which we feel is a critical organizational design construct for the early phases of SOA strategy and SOA governance. Finally, we have provided a planning devise with descriptions and phasing for various types of governance organizations and boards. You may adapt this to your own purposes as you like. As we emphasize, governance organizational models should not be considered a complete governance construct. They are not. Governance organizations are essential as part of an integrated policy enforcement model, but governance boards alone are not sufficient. That said, your SOA governance organization is a critical dimension of your enterprise SOA governance model, and we hope this chapter helps with this challenging aspect of governance.