A lifecycle approach to SOA governance

Due to the distributed nature of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), maintaining control in a SOA environment becomes more difficult as services spread over different lines-of-business. The concept of SOA governance has emerged as a way to implement control mechanisms in a SOA. In this paper we identify a lifecycle based approach for executing SOA governance. This approach consists of defining a SOA strategy, aligning the organization, managing the service portfolio, controlling the service lifecycle, enforcing policies and managing service levels. By incorporating a maturity model in this approach, it is possible to minimize the required effort while still having sufficient governance. From a series of interviews that have been carried out we could conclude that most current SOA projects - although relatively limited in their scope - raise governance issues that need to be addressed to prevent future problems.