Service Oriented Architecture or SOA can be difined as the underlying structure that manages communications between two or more services. This underlying structure can be seen at work in businesses that provide goods and services over the web.
The definition of Service Oriented Architecture or SOA governance is a way of exercising control over this structure using either a narrow focus of policies and monitoring or a broader focus using a perspective which is more business oriented. SOA Governance should also have the focus of adding valueto the business usually by the development of services. Gartner (an information technology firm) also defines Service Oriented Architecture as ‘Ensuring and validating that assets and artifacts within the architecture are acting as expected and maintaining a certain level of quality.’
SOA governance is becoming a more main stream business practice as companies are able to transform and add value to their IT components. The governance part of the structure is quite important as this comprises the organisations principles and rules that determines how a business should function. Without governance the implementation of the SOA structure within an organisation would grow and develop with no checks and balances leading to massive problems down the track.
The process of SOA governance can be broken down into three parts which includes a registry, policy creation and testing protocal. It is important for all three parts to be included in the SOA governance as these parts all work together to make SOA governance successful.
The SOA registry is basically a continually growing data base of information about services that are available in the implementation of SOA in any given company. The data base that makes up the registry allows companies to efficiently recognise and communicate with each other.
The second part of SOA governance is the creation of policies which put restraints and behavioural restrictions on SOA to ensure that there is consistency rather than conflict between the services. These boundaries or constraints are also important in ensuring good engineering practices are followed, they also provide a company with customer relations principles that are efficient and also ensure that any government policies and laws are adhered to. The use of SOA policy also allows for policy exceptions to be introduced within the policies and restraints.
The last part of the SOA governance process involves testing and monitoring. To ensure that the SOA solution is cost effective, efficient and as up to date as possible it is important to have performance monitoring and audits which can easy demonstrate this.