Service Oriented Architecture For Dummies®

Chapter 11. SOA Governance

In This Chapter

• Governing by the people, for the people

• Figuring out IT governance

• Governing SOA

• Getting ready for SOA governance

While a lot of organizations are starting to understand that service oriented architectures have the potential to transform the value of their IT assets, the ability to make SOA work comes down to governance. What do we mean by this? Well, in a broad sense, governance is just like it sounds — putting a consistent process in place to make sure there are checks and balances that ensure that the expected results happen. In the case of SOA, we're talking about keeping checks and balances between business and IT, between the business and government regulations, and between service and performance. Governance applies to human processes as well as software processes, and the consequences of failure are high.

The overarching principle behind governance is trust. All parties involved (the line of business managers, IT managers, software developers, business partners, and suppliers) must be able to trust that each party will execute its function to make the whole organization work according to established laws. Without governance, your SOA implementation will be a wild, untamed frontier. That isn't a very comforting thought, is it?

What Is Governance?

There are many ways to define governance. Governance comprises the organizing principles and rules that determine how an organization should behave. It is also interesting to note that governance ...