The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know about Information Technology

6.5. This Is Not Deadwood

The HBO television series Deadwood takes place in a nearly lawless gold-rush town on the American frontier in the late 1800s. Without an effective governance policy, your IT infrastructure under SOA may come to resemble that kind of place. But when you put the right policies in place, you have happy citizens, and the gold just piles up.

Policies and approaches to SOA governance must arise organically in the organizations they serve, and each organization is different. You are going to have to grow your own. But I can tell you the elements that are going to have to be in place for an effective governance strategy over the long term. These elements include

• Appropriate scale

• Definition of scope

• Clear communication of rules

• Separation of architectural and business issues

• Documentation of rationales

• Opportunity to participate

• Strong enforcement

• Ability to evolve

All aspects of your SOA governance must be appropriately scaled to the problem they address.

Municipal laws and regulations apply to issues such as which side of the street I can park on, and whether we should put that new addition on the high school. Federal laws concern treaties among nations.

Your SOA governance is like that. It must handle issues from the local, which might apply to coding standards or peer review methods at the team level, to the global, such as whether your infrastructure will standardize on a common protocol, such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).

Every portion of the SOA governance ...