Get Serious About SOA Governance: A Five-Step Action Plan for Architects

Whether your organization's service-oriented architecture (SOA) has 50 services being used by one customer, or 50 customers using one service, you need SOA governance; increased business agility depends on it. SOA governance provides the ability to quickly and continuously translate and transmit business strategy and requirements into the processes, policies, and controls that will guide the evolution of your infrastructure and your enterprise.

Failure to provide effective SOA governance exposes your organization to serious risks resulting from:

• Insufficient adoption of services
• Fragmented approaches to SOA
• Resources wasted on services that can't be reused
• Rampant and redundant service creation across siloed SOA initiatives
• Ineffective communication of priorities and best practices
• Cultural resistance to change

For any organization that has adopted SOA as its primary approach to enterprise architecture, governance becomes the conduit that connects and aligns corporate, IT, and business unit objectives. For these organizations, effective governance ensures that communication, collaboration, and the two-way flow of information keep SOA initiatives and investments inextricably connected to the enterprise to deliver sustainable business value.