SOA Governance
In today’s tough business climate of heightened competition, complex regulations, and constant change, the issue of corporate governance has risen to the top of many executives’ minds. Management must be able to set the groundrules that everybody within their company has to follow, they must require the visibility needed to confirm that people are following the rules, and they must have the control necessary to make the appropriate adjustments.
No area of an enterprise’s operations are as complex as information technology (IT). Combine this complexity with the typical IT shop’s inflexibility and opacity, and it’s no wonder that IT governance is the most critical area of corporate governance in today’s competitive enterprise. Of all the different elements and processes that make up IT governance, the ones that focus on enterprise architecture are the most important, because architecture provides the framework for the IT infrastructure and its use within the organization. Unfortunately, however, many organizations are struggling with their enterprise architecture, just as they are faced with IT governance challenges.
Fortunately, there is hope on the horizon in the form of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA is an approach to enterprise architecture that abstracts IT functionality into business-oriented Services. The application of SOA to IT governance–what we call SOA governance–promises to provide the visibility and control necessary for IT governance, while increasing the business agility today’s organizations require.