Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

1.4. GOVERNANCE AND RESOURCE MANAGEMENT AND ALLOCATION

Many people equate governance with management and allocation of resources and assets, such as financial and budgeting decisions, human resources, and physical assets. Weill and Ross discuss governance of key categories of assets, such as:^[]

^[] Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross, IT Governance: How Top Performers Manage IT Decisions for Superior Results, Harvard Business School Press, 2004, pp. 6–7.

• Human resources and personnel

• Financial assets

• Physical assets, such as buildings, property, equipment, and similar fixed assets

• Intellectual property, such as patents, trademarks, copyrights, trademarks, brands

• Information, data, and IT assets

• Relationship assets, such as customer, supplier, and regulatory relationships

In this sense, then, governance is essential where the allocation and management of critical corporate resources impacts corporate performance. Decisions relating to the management of human resources have a direct bearing on organizational performance, as well as legal and financial implications; and thus human resources can fall under a governance process. Certainly, key executive hiring and firing decisions are made by subcommittees comprised of members of the board of directors, and those decisions often fall under the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reporting requirements for public companies. The same can be said for financial management, physical assets, intellectual property, IT assets, and others.

The irony ...