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governance, SOA governance must also address the convergence of other
forces such as organizational structure, IT and governance processes, organ-
izational culture, behavior and political dynamics, and metrics that help
measure governance. Thus, to better address the holistic nature of SOA gov-
ernance, I defined SOA governance as follows:
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SOA governance refers to the organization, processes, policies, and
metrics required to manage an SOA successfully. A successful SOA
is one that meets defined business objectives over time. In addition,
an SOA governance model establishes the behavioral rules and
guidelines of the organization and participants in the SOA, from
architects and developers to service consumers, service providers,
and even applications and the services themselves. These behavioral
rules and guidelines are established via a body of defined SOA poli-
cies. SOA policies are specific and cover business, organizational,
compliance, security, and technology facets of services operating
within an SOA.
SOA governance consists of the organization and processes re-
quired to guide the business success of an SOA and Web services.
SOA governance defines and enforces the Web services policies that
are needed to manage a SOA for business success.
While this definition is sound, I realized that a simpler definition would
help clarify governance and SOA governance in particular. Therefore, we
will augment the complex and detailed SOA governance definition above
with a more simple and elegant definition:
SOA governance is doing the right SOA things the right way for the
SOA stakeholders.
Let us break this definition down a bit more. There are three fundamen-
tal elements to this definition of SOA governance: (1) Do the right SOA
things; (2) Do the right SOA things the right way; and (3) Do the right
SOA things the right way for the SOA stakeholders. This definition can thus
be expanded as follows:
SOA governance is the definition, implementation and ongoing ex-
ecution of an SOA stakeholder decision model and accountability
framework that ensures an organization is pursing an appropriate
SOA strategy aligned with business goals, and is executing that
strategy in accordance with guidelines and constraints defined by a
body of SOA principles and policies. SOA policies are enforced via
Introduction to Enterprise SOA Governance 7