SOA Governance

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Maximize the business value of Service Oriented Architecture

SOA Governance is designed to enable organizations to realize 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 organization's people, processes, SOA Governance information and assets.

Getting started

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

The IBM SOA Governance lifecycle ; a recommended strategy 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 ; 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 industry-leading services, methodologies, software technology and best practices to address common governance challenges, 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 provided by SOA Governance are:

Realization of the business benefits of SOA