SOA governance: The mere mention of it makes most people's eyes glaze over. But SOA will only deliver on its myriad promises when it's backed by an effective governance effort. Without effective governance, you're setting your SOA initiative up for failure. SOA governance will help you:

1. Understand how SOA investments create business value
2. Determine the ROI of your SOA
3. Reduce risk in the transformation to SOA

"Simply put, SOA governance is a management framework that helps you get the best business value out of the assets you already have or intend to build” says Stephen Bennett, BEA's Americas SOA Practice Lead and resident SOA organization and governance expert. "SOA governance allows you to track your services and find out exactly how they're being used. And that tells you exactly how much business value they're generating. Without governance, you have no visibility into your SOA."

Understand how SOA investments are creating business value
In 2008 CIOs and COOs are demanding more than just responsiveness from their IT organizations; they're demanding that IT create value. To do that, you need to understand the challenges that the business is facing and use technology to solve them. An effective governance strategy facilitates that by bringing together IT and business.

Your governance model lays out the goals for your SOA, for each stakeholder, and for the business as a whole. Once your SOA is underway, stakeholders must have access to the relevant information in order to understand and communicate the business value of their slice of the SOA. An effective SOA governance solution must include the means to gather and disseminate that information.  That is key to determining the overall ROI of SOA. 

Determining the ROI of your SOA
Governance can also help you justify the cost of your SOA initiatives (and you will be asked to justify it). After all, one of the fundamental promises of SOA is increased efficiency through reuse of services. Every time you reuse a service, you're generating a return on your original SOA investment. So unless you can somehow track service use, you'll never be able to calculate ROI.

"SOA is a beehive, and governance is how you ensure that all the bees are doing what they're supposed to be doing," says Bob Rhubart, a Senior Product Marketing Specialist at BEA. "Effective SOA Governance allows you to leverage investments you've already made, and helps you to make informed decisions going forward." And making the right business decisions is the key to reducing risk.

Reducing risk
When the business asks for change, IT needs to deliver. But IT also needs to be able to predict the impact of change across the organization. What services can you leverage? What applications and services will be affected? How can you learn from past mistakes?

"Governance allows you to course-correct," says Bennett. "SOA is still a young discipline, and we're still learning how best to use it. When you put together your initial SOA strategy, you're working on assumptions. Some of your assumptions will be right, and others won't. An effective governance effort allows you to adjust on the fly, because you have visibility into how all the pieces are working together. But if you're not tracking your progress as part of your governance effort, you won't even know when you're going off course."

Developing a successful governance plan
The single most effective thing you can do to ensure that your governance plan succeeds is to get commitment from senior management to start planning early.
"I've seen too many companies look at governance reactively," says Bennett.  They wait for something to go wrong and then try to fix it. Some things, such as service sprawl, can be fixed that way, but some things can't. If you don't institute governance early, it's possible to end up with a siloed SOA—which is the very thing SOA is supposed to prevent."

BEA offers an assessment of your SOA governance needs to help ensure that you implement the right governance plan for your needs. The BEA Organization and Governance Planning Service (OGPS) can assess your organization and help design an SOA governance roadmap that best suits its maturity and direction. Click here to request more information and find out how to get your assessment today.

BEA also offers a comprehensive technology solution for SOA governance to help organizations demonstrate measurable return on their SOA investments. For more information on how today's organizations are using BEA's SOA governance products and services to deliver business value, visit our SOA governance resource center at www.bea.com/soa-governance.

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