Article: SOA Governance: The Basics

Posted by Stefan Tilkov on Jun 11, 2007

Sections

Enterprise Architecture

Topics

Governance ,

SOA

Tags

SOA Adoption ,

policy ,

Organizational Patterns

In a new InfoQ article, MomentumSI's Ed Vazquez explains the basics of SOA governance, with an explicit focus on the need for a holistic SOA governance model and shared governance principles.

Ed describes the difference between strategic and tactical governance. Quoting from the article,

"Strategic governance" often results in a set of ideal enterprise SOA policy based on cutting-edge technology, evolving standards, and the latest and greatest markitecture (marketing architecture) that the vendors promise will be ready to ship "next quarter". On the other hand, "tactical governance" results in which policy gets configured in which SOA platform for specific integrations. Both must be aligned for Governance to occur.

Another concept introduced by the article is "the six pillars of SOA", which in the author's opinion form the basis for a SOA program:

Ed points out that some critical questions need to be answered to formalize the SOA effort (see the article for details). Associating the concept of strategic vs. tactical governance, the "six pillars", and these questions (and their answers), leads to the following diagram:



The article's conclusion is that while both technical and strategic governance need to be in place for a SOA governance initiative to succeed, achieving basic SOA governance can become  a matter of weeks when a pragmatic approach is taken.

Read the full article.

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