SOA Governance is a critical part of the SOA adoption effort. It begins with a concrete definition of what your organization hopes to achieve by adopting SOA, and then sets in place the people who will make the policy decisions that through effective processes, guide your organization to that desired outcome.
There is no one universal approach to SOA governance that works at all organizations, rather, the organization must take into account their own business structure, organizational model, and corporate culture in determining the appropriate way to drive SOA adoption, whether through Enterprise Architecture, a cross-functional Center of Excellence, or by simply relying on the organization as is to modify their individual behaviors to reach the goals desired.
The policy makers must address the desired behavior of the organization in defining and choosing what projects to execute, known as pre-project governance, the desired behavior of the project teams that are building the services and their consumers, known as project governance, and the desired behavior of those services, consumers, and the people that manage them at run-time as they execute in production.
However, stating policies are not enough. The organization must be educated on the desired behavior and the policies that will guide you there, and some amount of enforcement must be put in place to achieve compliance with those policies. Whether it is pre-project, project, or run-time governance, there are many technologies that can increase the efficiency of your compliance processes, whether through automated compliance checks, frameworks that guarantee compliance when used, or by simply raising the awareness through easy access to information about services and their consumers.
Ultimately, governance can only be effective if the organization puts measurements in place to judge whether or not the desired behavior is being achieved. Measuring compliance with policies is easy to capture, but if the wrong policies are put in place, the desired behavior will not be achieved. Governance is first and foremost about achieving the desired behavior. If policy compliance does not yield the desired behavior, then the policies may need to be changed.
As your organization proceeds along its SOA journey, the effectiveness of your governance processes can make or break your efforts. With good governance you can make your SOA efforts, and ultimately your business more successful, whether that represents some small changes in an organization that already works very well with its IT department, or a more fundamental change in the way the IT department works with the rest of the organization.