Service Oriented Architecture Field Guide for Executives

11.4. SUMMARY

Governance is essential to successful SOA adoption and preservation of ROI. Just like the bumper lanes in bowling, governance accomplishes three things: reduce risk, provide focus, and increase the chance of success. Although standards, rules, policies, and enforcement committees are common governance elements, this is not the end of the story. Governance is as much or even more about organizational change, design patterns, guidelines, and best practices as it is about rules and regulations. To the extent that rules do enter the story, they should be clearly defined, truly objective, and automatically enforced by the infrastructure wherever possible.

SOA governance represents a crucial lynchpin in any SOA adoption strategy. Provided that it is implemented to help mitigate risk and that it is implemented incrementally according to a well-reasoned plan with milestones and clear business value at each stage, the chance of success is very high. You may not bowl a strike every time, but with proper governance, you have got a decent chance of consistently getting spares.