Most people think of SOA = Web Services. Well that is not true. It is correct that Web Services (covered in the next section) are important and play a major part in the implementation of services but there are lots of non-technical issues that need to be considered.

SOA is not just about the technical solutions but also about the correct decisions. Each of the SOA services is used for a purpose and some quality threshold needs to be established.

For example, if a delivery company is using an Address Validation service from an external supplier then it is critically important that the Address Validation service keeps on working. However, services need to be updated as well so a Service Level Agreement between the customer and the service supplier need to be agreed.

If SOA is to create a more dynamic environment for services to interact and to encourage reuse of services, controlling how these services interact with each other then it also needs to be controlled and standardised. These controls and standards help to guide SOA Services and makes agreements with suppliers (providers) and customers (consumers).

SOA Governance is about

1) People / Training

2) Standards / Procedures

3) Components (such as authentication, encryption, auditing, validation and logging)

As companies use SOA to better align IT with the business, they can ideally use SOA governance to improve overall IT governance. Employing SOA governance is key if companies are to realise the benefits of SOA. For SOA to be successful, SOA business and technical governance is not optional, it is required.

Aspects of SOA Governance:

• Definition (scope, interface, boundaries of the service)


• Deployment


• Versioning


• Migration / Deprecation


• Dependencies


• Messaging


• Monitoring


• Ownership


• Testing


• Security

SOA Governance will be covered in a future tutorial.

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