The Value of SOA Governance
The definition of corporate governance is creating, communicating, and enforcing policies in a corporate environment. Governance is the key to balancing executive control with employee and customer empowerment across the enterprise. While many corporate governance activities don’t directly involve the information technology (IT) department, the enterprise does call upon IT to provide tooling for automating policy creation and enforcement, when it’s possible to represent policies in a machine-understandable format.
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach to organizing IT resources to meet the changing needs of the business in flexible ways. Governance is an essential part of any SOA implementation, because it ensures that the organization applies and enforces the policies that apply to the Services that the organization creates as part of its SOA initiative. But more importantly, organizations can leverage SOA best practices to represent policies broadly in such a way that the organization can achieve better policy management, flexibility, and visibility into policy compliance across the enterprise.