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Update to Governance Section of wiki..

From: John, Anil <>
Date: 2007-02-13T18:05:12+00:00
ID
Thread: Update to Governance Section of wiki..

SOA-RA
Colleagues,

As discussed at the last telcon, I've been in the
process of updating and re-organizing the Governance content on the wiki based
on the various inputs including discussions at the Face-2-Face
meetings.

http://wiki.oasis-open.org/soa-rm/TheArchitecture/Governance (Also included in this e-mail
below)

As I was going though the existing content (which
can now be found on http://wiki.oasis-open.org/soa-rm/TheArchitecture/Governance/OldGovernanceContent),
the thought that kept running through my mind was that a majority of what was
there really came under the management umbrella and not the governance
umbrella.

Would appreciate your thoughts.

Regards,

- Anil

1.
What Is Governance

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development in the "OECD Principles of Corporate Governance" [1] defined
Corporate Governance as providing the structure for determining organizational
objectives and monitoring performance to ensure that objectives are attained.
The OECD was careful to note that there is no one single model for good
corporate governance and as such, different organizations may have different
perspectives on what constitutes good governance.

Corporate governance is a broad topic and deals
with a variety of aspects such as human resources, physical assets, financial
assets, Information Technology and more. But given the context of Governance for
SOA, we are primarily concerned with how best Information Technology (IT) assets
are organized to deliver value to the business. In short, with IT Governance.

Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross of MIT defines IT
Governance as "specifying the decision rights and accountability framework to
encourage desirable behavior in the use of IT" [2]. This decision captures the
reality that each organization will have a range of governance depending on the
perceived needs of the participants, given that the definition of what
constitutes desirable behavior will vary depending on the organizations and
participants.

2. Governance and Management

It is worthwhile to distinguish between Governance
and Management before proceeding any further.

Governance determines who makes the decisions. It
implies the authority to govern. That authority could be formal or informal and
could be codified in an explicit manner or implied. It is about having the
decision rights to influence conduct to ensure desirable behavior and the
authority to adjudicate when issues arise.

Management, on the other hand, is the process of
making and implementing the actual decisions.

3. IT Governance and SOA Governance

It is hard to draw a clean line of separation
between IT and SOA Governance, but one particular point of differentiation is
the concept of ownership boundaries.

Traditional IT governance has implied governance
applied within a single Enterprise; a single ownership domain, if you will.
Given that the SOA-RM defines SOA as a paradigm for organizing and utilizing
distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership
domains, the concepts of SOA Governance are not limited to just a single
Enterprise but must also apply across Enterprises i.e. across ownership domains.

As such SOA Governance should be considered an
extension of existing IT Governance that deals with the decision rights,
processes and policies that are put into place to encourage the adoption and
operation of a SOA that may cross ownership boundaries. At the same time, it
should also be recognized that the desirable behaviors that need to be
encouraged in a SOA implementation may conflict with the existing mechanisms
that are in place as part of the existing IT Governance and the mechanisms that
are in place for the management of IT need to be extended and modified to
account for SOA.

4. Why Is Governance Important to SOA?