SOA governance is evolving from an internal IT function focused on policy documentation to a broader function that extends externally and involves more stakeholders. As businesses increasingly adopt cloud technologies and expose capabilities through APIs, SOA governance is merging with API management and application management. The new model of governance is more relevant for a wider audience like business users and developers, and aims to enable the business rather than stand in its way.

1. SOA governance for the
modern business

4. • The term “SOA governance” has taken on the connotation of a select
group of people coming together periodically to talk about SOA
topics, establishing a policy which is dutifully documented, and then
disappearing back to their ivory towers without making much impact
on the business. But the notion of governance is becoming ever more
important as businesses adopt SaaS technologies and initiate mobile,
big data, and IoT initiatives. Suddenly those responsible for SOA
policy can’t exist in their ivory towers anymore; every aspect of the
business needs access to those policies, and those policies now touch
everyone in the business. SOA governance therefore is evolving from
a largely internal function for IT teams to one that extends to external
audiences.

5. • SOA itself has become a bit of a bête noire for IT professionals, yet it’s
almost universally acknowledged that the principles are solid; the
notion of abstracting enterprise software capabilities as reusable
services in order to support more flexible business processes and
ideally, more agile organizations is a laudable aim. But the reality of
SOA implementation was that SOA organization tended to be
centralized amongst internal teams, and any aim of improving IT and
organizational governance was lost among the numerous enterprise
integration projects IT teams had to undertake. SOA governance
became an exercise in connecting endpoints to endpoints

6. • Worst of all, the consumers of the services were lost in the shuffle –
both the software endpoints that interacted with the services as well
as those people in the business who wanted to consume service
capabilities and use them to achieve business goals. Hence the
reputation of the IT team as the department of “No” – often the
technological implementation was where ideas that would help the
business achieve greater innovation or agility would go to die.

7. • As businesses evolve into more loosely-coupled organizations,
exposing their services through APIs and increasing external service
adoption by consumers inside the enterprise, SOA governance, API
management, and application management are beginning to
converge into a new kind of governance for the modern business. This
type of governance not only has greater architectural coherence for a
composable enterprise, but it’s now relevant to a wider audience
outside of IT – mobile and app developers, data analysts, line of
business owners – anyone who wants to consume external or internal
services. And thanks to democratization of technology, all of those
consumers expect that the applications and services they use at work
to be flexible and convenient to access.

8. • Governance from the IT organization is now more important than
ever but is evolving as quickly as the IT function itself is. If we take
governance to mean establishing and enforcing standards around
how people and technology work together to achieve business goals,
IT does need to take the lead in establishing those standards of access
control, SLAs, and policies. But IT must not only be a cop, but also an
enabler and and an empowerer of an entire ecosystem of digital
capabilities for both internal and external users.

9. • Mike Hamilton, head of IT for MuleSoft, says, “it’s my job to be a
partner to the business. I can’t stand in the way of what the business
wants to do – otherwise, we wouldn’t achieve our goals – but what I
need to do is show my partners in the business how to do things in
the most efficient way so that they get the results they want.” As the
role of IT evolves from the Department of No to a true business
partner, SOA governance evolves alongside it from an irrelevant set of
policies and documentation to an amalgamation of governance
coupled with API and application management designed to enable
the business to get where it needs to go.