SOA Architect challange - Governance

In SOA, governance plays out to be most critical in implementing solution. It brings standard, rules, best practices and regulations on which all enterprise stands on. They also bring historical background for successful transitioning of technology stacks. Here are major phases on which SOA Governance stands:

• Planning 
• Monitoring 
• Execution
• Assurance 
• Publication
  

Five major governance considerations for an architect to design an SOA.
Information Management: In enterprise, information definition and its flow are key components. Metadata defines the structure of information and its relationship with other. This will be influenced by Business, Technology and Governance with in organization.

Policy Management: Policy is about a standard rules and regulation learned over a period time by organizations. It is required to keep maintain security, integrity and consistency with existing enterprise systems. Enterprise architect has to ensure that any new implementation complies with these policy. Policy management is applied both at design and run-time, but new policies and services needs to be interlinked to provide improvement. This is a four steps process.

1. Definition of policies
   
2. Association with organization behavior
   
3. Enforcement of these new policies
   
4. Reporting and monitoring these policies effect
   

Service Contract Management:  Contract is between two parties, Provider and consumer, about a service. SOA architect has to understand consumers demands and connect with providers service offering and design a contract to satisfy both parties. This process need consideration to many different aspects like:

1. Owner service offering
   
2. Cost Model 
3. Targeted service level 
4. Maintenance Schedule for service 
5. Process of enhancement requests 
6. Customer support - call frequency 
7. Responsibilities of both provider and consumer

Life cycle Management: SOA services also have life just like any product. In this, provider and consumer play major role in service design. Following is the phase-wise transition of provider and consumer.
Provider Life-cycle for a change:

• Plan > Build > Assure > Deploy/Publish > Monitor

Consumer Life-cycle for a change:

• Plan > Discover > Contract > Build > Monitor
  

Interoperability: SOA is design to work with any technology implemented services. But throws other inter departmental and organizational issues like: 

• Governance 
• Quality Standard 
• Management
  

References:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8U-xa9bhLYQ&feature=channel