I just came across this whitepaper from webMethods (who is not a client) SOA Governance: Enabling Sustainable Success with SOA. Putting to one side the fact that this is from a vendor and the checklist in the Appendix is clearly oriented towards webMethods offerings - based on the acquisition of Infravio earlier in the year - I have to say I am pretty impressed.

Too much of the discussion of SOA governance focuses on the design-time: adherence to standards, such as the WS-I profiles, schema validation etc. It ignores the fact that IT services, like services in the real world (think your mobile/cell phone service), are experienced by the customer, which is about more than just what is built by the provider. Because services are experienced, SOA governance must extend to the encompass the complete service lifecycle, from development through to operations: something which is acknowledged in the webMethods paper.

That being said, I do have a couple of quibbles:

• Business involvement is called out during service change but not in the definition of the quality of service agreements, which comes across as the domain of the IT organisation. Business involvement is essential here to capture expectations and ensure that metrics are presented in a business-meaningful way
• Service contracts are highlighted in the discussion of the SLAs - "how well" a service is performed - but not in terms of the functionality provided by the service - the "what" - and the commercial aspects of service provision - the "how much". If an SOA approach is to really deliver business value then it must be possible for business and IT to establish some common ground in terms of service expectations and comprehensive service contracts, which encompass all of the aspects of those expectations, do that.

Bearing in mind those two important consderations, the paper is worth a few minutes (as are our reports on SOA and SOA quality management which provide our perspective on some of these issues).