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