What is SOA governance?

SOA governance is an extension of IT governance that focuses on the lifecycle of services and composite applications in an organization’s service-oriented architecture (SOA). The function of SOA governance is to define:

• Decision rights for the development, deployment and management of new services.
• Monitoring and reporting processes for capturing and communicating governance results. Because SOA applications are intrinsically fragmented, they introduce new governance challenges. But with the proper policies, principles, standards, procedures and processes in place, businesses can realize the full benefit of service orientation. An effective SOA governance platform not only helps business and IT teams better identify which projects contribute most to business goals, but it also empowers employees to work and collaborate more efficiently by clearly defining their roles and responsibilities.

What is service lifecycle management?

Once the SOA governance framework is implemented, it will be used in the model, assemble, deploy and manage phases within the SOA lifecycle. Related to the operational aspects of implementing SOA governance, service lifecycle management addresses how services will be developed, deployed and managed.

Service lifecycle management focuses on the development and deployment of services. SOA governance supplies the decision rights, processes and policies for those activities. Once a service is deployed, there must be management aspects in place to control and monitor the service.

Within service lifecycle management there is a set of functions that will need to be in place and governed to ensure that the value proposition of SOA, particularly reuse and cost reduction, is achieved.

For more information on how to advance your SOA governance procedures, visit: ibm.com/software/solutions/soa/entrypoints/advancing_soa_governance.html

• March, 2006 - IBM announced our SOA Governance strategy and direction and tooling
• October 2006 - Service Lifecycle Management was added to detail how SOA Governance will be operationalized within the SOA Lifecycle.
• December 2006 - IBM featured Empowering the ‘A’ in SOA, which included a number of new and updated products targeted at approach to Service Lifecycle Management Architecture component.
• Today - IBM is adding SOA Quality Management to our SOA Governance and Service Lifecycle Management

The announcement today focuses on extending the overall SOA Governance and Service Lifecycle Management capabilities with a set of new Rational test tools and updates to Tivoli products and GTS (Global Technology Services) Offerings.

The increased flexibility and cross-organizational nature of business services that SOA facilitates, requires that organizations establish a framework to implement active decision-making, accurate tracking, improved serviceability and better communication.

SOA governance is the mechanism to ensure that the decision making structure is solid, relationships between services and parties are managed and that there is compliance with the laws, policies, standards and procedures under which an organization operates.

Specifically SOA governance

• Creates higher return from focused SOA investments
• Aligns IT and business strategies, creates communication paths
• Reduces coordination costs: less time wasted due to poorly-managed conflicts
• Institutes efficient and effective decision making and clarity executing roles and accountability
• Measures effectiveness of SOA

An enterprise that fails to realize the importance of an effective governance structure may not stand to benefit much from a SOA transition.