SOA Governance

Maximise the business value of Service Oriented Architecture

SOA Governance is designed to enable organisations to realise the full potential of SOA. It addresses issues that, if left unattended, may be inhibitors to gaining the flexibility and time-to-market benefits associated with SOA. These essential issues surrounding the lifecycle of a service are:

• Decision rights — who is empowered to make what decisions
• Measurements and controls — how to determine if the goals are achieved

Effective governance is more than just technology. It calls for a lifecycle approach which integrates an organisation's people, processes, SOA Governance information and assets.

Based on our experience working with many early adopters of SOA, we have developed:

• The IBM® SOA Governance lifecycle (US) — a recommended strategy to help to develop, deploy, maintain, and enhance effective SOA Governance. The output of this lifecycle is an SOA Governance framework.
• The IBM SOA Governance and Management Method (US) — a clear, work breakdown structure for project planning. It includes detailed, step-by-step tasks and recommendations for each phase of the IBM SOA Governance lifecycle.
• Establish your own SOA Governance framework by leveraging our services, methodologies, software technology and best practices, which are among the industry leaders, to help address common governance challenges (US), such as:
  • Establishing decision rights for your SOA environment
  • Defining appropriate services
  • Managing the lifecycle of service assets
  • Measuring effectiveness

Why does SOA Governance matter?

IBM has found that to improve the successful implementation of SOA, there is a requirement to develop SOA Governance early in the process. SOA services require improved governance to maintain the level of control needed to support the new Business/IT joint environment. The values SOA Governance helps to provide are:

Realisation of the business benefits of SOA

• Provides business process flexibility
• Allows improved time to market

Mitigation of business risk

• Assists in maintaining quality of service
• Helps to ensure consistency of service

Effectiveness of Business/IT teams

• Measurement of the right business and IT metrics
• Helps to improve communication between business and IT

To learn more about SOA Governance read "A case for SOA Governance (US)" article on IBM developerWorks® website.

To understand the value of governance in software development read "Business Process of Software Developments (US)" article.