IBM SOA Governance Lifecycle

During the planning phase of building an SOA Governance framework, you focus on understanding the overall scope of the governance need within your organization and identify areas for improved governance.

Most of these activities are people-centric and focus on extensive collaboration. Think of this as the step in the lifecycle where the team defines “the problem to address”.

This phase includes:

• Committing to a strategy for SOA within the overall IT strategy
• Explicitly determining the level of IT and SOA capabilities
• Articulating and refining the vision and strategy for SOA
• Reviewing current governance capabilities and arrangements
• Developing a governance plan

Once the opportunities for improved governance are identified, business and IT professionals work together to define and modify the current governance arrangements and mechanisms. For example, new approaches to creating policies should be agreed on at this time.

Other important governance decisions made during this phase include:

• Establishing or refining a SOA Center of Excellence (COE)
• Defining additional capabilities required, such as upgrades to the IT infrastructure
• Agreeing on policies for service reuse across lines of business
• Putting funding mechanisms in place to encourage this reuse
• Establishing mechanisms to guarantee service levels

Solutions to the governance need are then put into action during this phase. Common activities would include:

• Deploying new and enhanced governance arrangements such as:
  • Tracking the decision making processes
  • Enabling the policy infrastructure
  • Providing the monitoring tools
• Deploying technology to discover and manage assets
• Communicating and educating expected behaviors and practices within both the business and IT decision-making communities
• Enabling the policy infrastructure

Governance arrangements and mechanisms that were identified in the Define phase and deployed in the Enable phase are monitored.

This provides the opportunity to evaluate the results and if needed, initiate a new cycle of these 4 phases to refine and enhance its governance effectiveness.

Actions in this phase include:

• Monitoring compliance with policies and governance arrangements, such as Service Level Agreements (SLAs), reuse levels, and change policies
• Analyzing IT effectiveness metrics