Over the past two decades, applications and their supporting infrastructures have become exceedingly complex, with many points of failure due to brittle architectures and tightly-coupled integrations.
“SOA” is arguably the most recognizable acronym in IT these days. This is because SOA has the potential to enable a much higher degree of business agility by transforming enterprise IT based on a service-driven delivery model.Unlike traditional application architectures, SOA is designed for change. Applications and systems based on SOA become flexible “plug-and-play” IT assets that can be quickly and easily re-purposed as the demands of the business evolve.
The definition of the word governance implies the action or manner of governing.SOA governance, introduces the notion of domain ownership, where domains are managed sets of Services sharing some common business context. In many cases these sets of Services are business Services, such as customer information, order processing, or product analysis. Each domain is responsible for maintaining the applications that support its Services and for maintaining the interfaces to its Services for other domains.
SOA governance is the set of solutions, policies and practices which enable companies to implement and manage an enterprise SOA. SOA governance addresses many challenges and makes it possible to realize ROI and the business benefits of loosely coupled services..
The main areas of governance include the following:
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Strategic alignment focuses on the imperative to align the business vision, goals and needs with the IT efforts.
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Value delivery focuses on how the value of IT can be proved through results like profitability, expense reduction, error reduction, improved company image, branding, and so on.
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Risk management focuses on business continuity and measures to be taken to protect the IT assets.
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Resource management focuses on optimizing infrastructure services that are a part of the On Demand Operating Environment (ODOE — see Resources) or other environment supporting the application services.
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Performance management focuses mainly on monitoring the services that run in a enterprise’s ODOE or other environment.
Any implementation of governance should be centered on the four pillars of an enterprise architecture: people, processes, technology, and services. One mechanism to implement an enterprise IT and SOA governance is by establishing a center of excellence (CoE) for IT and SOA governance that would enable a shared resource and capability center to function as a resource pool as new business application needs arise. A governance implementation needs to be supported by a hierarchical organizational reporting structure.
