Without solid governance, a successful application of SOA seems out of the question. That much has become clear in recent months, perhaps years. And it struck me that most of what we are saying about SOA Governance and management of (the life cycle of) services and service related artefacts, really applies to all software components meant to last longer than say three months, especially those we aspire to reuse. So while the topic seems to gain center stage only now in the context of Service Oriented Architecture, it really deserves that place in the spotlight outside the SOA scope as well.

One of the more interesting sessions during the Oracle SOA Partner event last week was on SOA Governance. Various reports show that the main threat to success of SOA implementation is stated to be "lack of Governance". One of the reports says "SOA governance provides organizations with the processes,
policies and solutions/technologies that can help to manage
increasingly complex SOA deployments in an effective and efficient
manner." 

The success of SOA lies to a large extent in achieving service reuse..... Read the rest of this entry »