The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know about Information Technology

5.11. Governance and Evolution

Since every change you make now impacts others, a governance process is required. What does governance process mean? It means that you need to have regular procedures that define who can change any part of the IT infrastructure, what can and cannot be changed, and how changes are made. The process must specify as well who needs to approve each change before it is actually deployed.

In SOA, everything can potentially interact with everything else. The number of pairwise interactions between component parts is virtually limitless. That means that individual "handshakes" cannot be negotiated; there must be standards and the standards must be set correctly the first time, since changing them is so difficult and expensive. SOA unites not just different groups within an enterprise, but their suppliers, customers, governmental agencies, and the like. The people affected by an architectural decision, the stakeholders, may very well work for different organizations—different corporations.

Before, you could get away with having geeks running around and changing systems on an ad-hoc basis. Now that IT systems are more important and interconnected, such change could have a significant impact on your enterprise and beyond. There has to be a well-defined governance process that defines:

• What the interface should look like

• What each service is supposed to perform

• How each service behaves

• How changes are verified and who approves them before they are deployed

In one ...