SOA Governance and Service Lifecycle Management

The IBM® SOA governance lifecycle expands the governance layer of the IBM SOA Foundation into manageable components.

Actions needed to establish, maintain, and enhance an effective SOA Governance framework are depicted as a lifecycle consisting of four phases: plan, define, enable, and measure.

Plan: Establish the governance needed

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.

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

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Define: Design the governance approach

After you identify the opportunities for improved governance, 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

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Enable: Put the governance model into action

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

• Deploying new and enhanced governance arrangements such as: Tracking the decision making processes; Enabling the policy infrastructure; and 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

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Measure: Monitor and manage the governance process

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

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

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