Datasheet

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What outcomes do we seek from SOA governance? How will we meas-
ure performance of governance?
SOA governance is confusing to many organizations for a variety of
reasons. In many cases, SOA governance is approached from too narrow of
a perspective, such as services governance, technical design governance, or
SOA platform governance. These SOA governance perspectives represent
the technical stakeholders of the SOA initiative very well, but do not articu-
late the requirements of other business and IT stakeholders.
Another common tendency is to focus on higher-level governance activ-
ities, such as the service portfolio management or funding and budgeting
processes, too early, when most organizations do not even have a ‘‘portfo-
lio’’ of services available to manage nor enough governance maturity to suc-
cessfully address these challenges. Oftentimes, focusing on governance
basics will go a long ways toward enabling success with more challenging
dimensions of governance. We address this later.
Of course, accompanying these are two other very interesting forces:
Too many stakeholders may be vying for control of governance, or there
may be complete apathy toward governance of any kind. This dichotomy
is very real depending on the culture and relative governance maturity of
the organization, as well as the political dynamics that may surround and
affect all other factors. We have seen both, and the governance model im-
plementation roadmap must be structured to take into consideration both
perspectives.
ADDRESSING SOA STAKEHOLDER BIASES
Governance is essential to represent the needs of your stakeholders. How-
ever, you must realize that while all stakeholder perspectives are valid, they
must be balanced with the needs and requirements of the enterprise. There
are some natural SOA stakeholder biases to watch for as you begin formu-
lating your SOA governance model:
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Services Governance. Focus is too narrow in scope: Many SOA gover-
nance enthusiasts mistakenly restrict SOA governance focus to govern-
ing services from a technical design- or runtime perspective. In this
mode, the focus tends to be technical service design, service interface
design, and service implementation.
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SOA Security Emphasis. While critical, security often focuses only on
technology issues and not business or process issues, and does not en-
compass organizational requirements or business decisions.
Addressing SOA Stakeholder Biases 17