Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

6.12. TOWARD AN INTEGRATED MODEL OF SOA POLICIES

One of the challenges we face in the SOA industry is the integration of SOA governance from an organizational, process, and policy enforcement perspective to the SOA runtime platforms and governance enforcement tools. There are many challenges to developing this integrated policy model.

First, as is often the case, the software vendor community has suborned the standards process to focus attention on those standards related to selling software and solving technical challenges. The technical focus on SOA policies via the WS-Policy Framework has led to a severe lack of attention being paid to the more difficult challenges of SOA—definition and enforcement of business and process policies via various governance processes, manual reviews and governance oversight boards.

Second, the notion of policy-driven SOA governance, or governance of any aspect of business or IT, demands a more scientific approach to what policies are, how they are derived, and how to provision them to various enforcement mechanisms across an enterprise. Once again, there has been significant work done from the technology and tooling perspective, but much less so from an organizational and process perspective.