Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

1.3. INTRODUCTION TO ENTERPRISE SOA GOVERNANCE

What is enterprise SOA governance? SOA governance is the process of ensuring all business and IT stakeholders' interests are served by the planning, funding, and execution of an enterprise SOA initiative. One of the early pioneers of SOA governance is the company WebLayers, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. WebLayers defines SOA governance as follows:^[]

^[] WebLayers Whitepaper: SOA Governance, 2005, p. 9.

SOA governance is the ability to ensure that all of the independent (SOA) efforts (whether in the design, development, deployment, or operations of a service) come together to meet enterprise requirements.

WebLayers developed the concept of a policy-driven SOA governance approach where in effect SOA governance is predicated on developing, formalizing, and enforcing a body of SOA policies that ensure conformance to enterprise SOA business and technology goals. In my opinion, this whitepa-per paved the way for the industry to understand the scope, breadth, and criticality of policies in a SOA governance framework.

However, SOA governance must be approached from an enterprise perspective and from a comprehensive and holistic viewpoint. An enterprise approach to SOA governance offers a more robust model than focusing narrowly on SOA governance. While explicitly defined SOA policies are essential to formalize and encode the enterprise requirements for SOA governance, SOA governance must also address the convergence of other forces ...