Increasing business flexibility and SOA adoption through effective SOA governance

Most organizations understand the need to address service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance during SOA adoption. An abundance of information is available defining SOA governance: what it is and what it is not, why it is important, and why organizational change must be addressed. Increasingly business and information technology (IT) stakeholders, executive and technical, acknowledge that SOA governance is essential for realizing the benefits of SOA adoption: building more-flexible IT architectures, improving the fusion between business and IT models, and making business processes more flexible and reusable. However, what is not clear is how an organization gets started. What works and what does not work? More importantly, what is required in SOA governance for organizations to see sustained and realized benefits? This paper describes a framework, the SOA governance model, that can be used to scope and identify what is required for effective SOA governance. Based on client experiences, we describe four approaches to getting started with SOA governance, and we describe how to use these four approaches to make shared services (services used by two or more consumers), reuse, and flexibility a reality. We also discuss lessons learned in using these four approaches.