Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

1.10. WHO ARE THE SOA STAKEHOLDERS?

One of the reasons SOA governance is more complex than IT governance is that SOA governance adds many more governance requirements and processes, and therefore more governance stakeholders, into the equation. In addition, as we have emphasized, the fundamental difference between management and governance is that governance requires stakeholder representation. Governance is an oversight process that ensures appropriate stakeholder representation for key enterprise decisions. Who are the stakeholders in an SOA initiative? There are a multitude of SOA stakeholders, as Exhibit 1.2 illustrates.

There are business stakeholders, which includes business unit executives who are concerned with driving revenue, sales, and profit by servicing customers with great products and services. These stakeholders are consumers of IT resources and thus will also be consumers of SOA and services. Their interests include the desire to increase market responsiveness and customer service, while driving IT costs out of their business.

IT stakeholders include IT executives, enterprise architects, project managers, business analysts, developers, and outsourcing partners. These stakeholders represent the service provider roles in an SOA initiative. Their interests include supporting business goals, increasing effectiveness of information exploitation, increasing IT efficiency and reusing of architecture and services, and speeding delivery of products and services to customers. ...