SOA Governance Notes

“Business and IT value chains today have started to merge together in the industry. We now speak of enterprise architecture and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) that are independent from IT implementation. With this change, we also need to adapt the way we structure businesses and IT landscape, define and develop architectures like SOA, and run enterprise-focused client engagements.

For all these reasons, governance plays a more important role in today's IT than it ever has before. In this article, I share IBM IT Management Consulting (ITMC) team's best practice governance approach, which we developed and implemented in several client engagements. Starting from proven IT governance structures and practices, I enhanced our governance model to meet SOA requirements.

Today, IT must react very quickly and flexibly to enable business almost in real time. IT has to design and manage part of a highly integrated and complex enterprise architecture, with increasingly blurred boundaries between business and IT components. This article proposes key governance functions that will help you achieve these goals and implement successful SOA engagements.

* IT's alignment with the enterprise results in the promised benefits being realized.
* IT enables the enterprise so that opportunities are exploited and benefits are maximized.
* IT resources are used responsibly.
* IT-related risks are managed appropriately.

Our governance model illustrated in Figure 1 is a com

Much more available in this paper

IT Governance Institute: briefing http://www.itgi.org/Template_ITGI.cfm?Section=ITGI&CONTENTID=6658&TEMPLATE=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm