Governance is about establishing chains of responsibility, authority, and communications; empowering people’s decision making. It is also about establishing measurements, policy and control mechanisms to enable stakeholders carrying out their roles and responsibilities successfully.

“Governance is essentially about ensuring that business is conducted properly. It is less about overt control and strict adherence to rules, and more about guidance and effective and equitable usage of resources to ensure sustainability of an organization’s strategic objectives” (The Open Group, 2014).

The following are mentioned as necessary governance characteristics (The Open Group, 2014):

• Discipline
• Transparency
• Independence
• Accountability
• Responsibility
• Fairness

“IT governance is the decision rights and accountability framework for encouraging desirable behaviors in the use of IT. IT governance reflects broader corporate governance principles while focusing on the management and use of IT to achieve corporate performance goals” (Ross, Weill, & Robertson, 2006).

From the definitions presented above let’s narrow them to SOA governance by examining what the referenced sources have to say about its importance for a Service Oriented Architecture. All of them agree that governance is vital for a successful SOA practice as affirmed by (Erl, et al., 2015) “A critical success factor to achieving the goals of an SOA adoption project is ensuring that a formal and well-defined system is in place to support the regulated evolution of the services, solutions, and other resources and assets that comprise the planned SOA ecosystem. Without establishing such a system, there is a constant and ever-increasing risk that the IT enterprise will lose its alignment with the business domain to become progressively less effective and more burdensome”.

“SOA Governance is a globalized set of rules and practices designed to optimize an organization’s architecture and the services that are contained within that architecture” (Limaye, 2013).

(Limaye, 2013) Classifies SOA governance policies as:

• Design time: for building a service, provide rules for developers.
• Run time: for operating a service, can be enforced by a service management system.

SOA governance must mitigate risks and help to advance the organization strategy, priorities and goals. Like any other investment, SOA initiatives are expected to gain benefits greater than their costs. Those benefits are measured in terms of business outcomes reflecting the company’s objectives; SOA governance should ensure that SOA initiatives achieve targeted business outcomes (Erl, et al., 2015).

References

Erl, T., Gee, C., Kress, J., Maier, B., Normann, H., Raj, P., . . . Winterberg, T. (2015). Next Generation SOA. Prentice Hall .

Limaye, M. (2013, April). SOA Fundamentals & Governance. Denver.

Ross, J. W., Weill, P., & Robertson, D. S. (2006). Enterprise Architecture as Strategy. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press.

The Open Group. (2014). TOGAF Version 9.1. Van Haren Publishing.