Another approach for describing SOA governance

Michael Poulin keeps 
asking the obvious question of why what we are modeling is SOA governance 
instead of just a general treatise on governance.  It seemed to me an 
approach might be to go back to SOA-RM to see what are the key pieces of SOA we 
are attempting to govern.  From that exercise, I would like to submit the 
following:

 

There is nothing in a general governance model that specifically makes it 
SOA.  This should not be surprising 
because governance has been in existence to some degree or other as long as 
there have been creatures which had to interact.  The model we have been developing for governance makes it 
abundantly clear that SOA governance is an instantiation, not a new concept. 

 

Our definition of SOA governance first considers the concepts and 
relationships as described in the OASIS SOA Reference Model:

 

Service Oriented 
Architecture (SOA) is a paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the 
control of different ownership domains.  

 

A service is a mechanism to enable access 
to one or more capabilities, where the access is provided using a prescribed 
interface and is exercised consistent with constraints and policies as specified 
by the service description.

 

From a dynamic perspective, there are three 
fundamental concepts that are important in understanding what is involved in 
interacting with services: the visibility between service providers and 
consumers, the interaction between them, and the real world effect of 
interacting with a service.

 

In support of the 
dynamics of interacting with services are a set of concepts that are about 
services themselves. These are the service description, the execution context of 
the service and the contracts and policies that relate to services and service 
participants.

 

From this, we may infer that governance in a SOA context 
is that organization of services that promotes their visibility, that 
facilitates interaction between service participants, and that enforces that the 
results of service interactions are those real world effects as described within 
the service description and constrained by policies and contracts as assembled 
in the execution context.  

 

SOA governance must specifically account for control 
across different ownership domains, i.e. all the participants may not be under 
the jurisdiction of a single governance authority.  However, for governance to be effective, 
the participants must agree to recognize the authority of a certain set of 
Decision Makers and must operate within the Governance Framework and through the 
Governance Processes so defined.  

 

Being distributed and representing different ownership domains, a SOA 
participant is likely under the jurisdiction of multiple governance domains 
simultaneously and may individually need to resolve consequent conflicts.  The governance domains may specify 
precedence for governance conformance or it may fall to the discretion of the 
participant to decide on the course of actions they believe 
appropriate.

 

Given the goals of SOA governance and the circumstances under which we 
expect it to operate, there are several primary implications for a SOA reference 
architecture.

…

 

 

Comments?

 

Ken