Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

10.4. COMMUNITY MODELS FOR GOVERNANCE: OPEN SOURCE AS A GUIDE

As SOA governance models become more pervasive, most organizations will wrestle with the challenges of adding new governance processes and oversight models into their enterprise. For many organizations, implementing any new governance or formalizing what was previously informal governance will come with a price. Governance does mean reallocation of long-held decision rights for key resources and responsibilities, and these are often accompanied by funding and budgeting responsibility.

Anytime there is funding on the line, organizations and individuals will respond in ways that will preserve their current authority, budgetary control and decision scope. There is a natural tendency to "preserve the silo" in any organization, while SOA encourages the dissolution and federation of silos. SOA governance will most times redistribute decision rights in a far different fashion than they are currently allocated. The transition from informal governance to explicit policy enforcement will always be challenging for most organizations.

In that case, there are perhaps other models of governance that are effective and can be leveraged for SOA governance. We believe that one such example is the community governance process embodied by the open source movement. As open source development models proliferate by targeting key segments of enterprise and desktop software for new open source projects, the communities that form around these ...