This document discusses enterprise governance and its importance for IT systems. It defines governance as the act of governing and decision making framework for an enterprise. Effective governance anticipates the needs of both business and IT teams. Governance involves creating guidelines that services must comply with to ensure high quality, predictable services. Strict governance standards can increase a company's profits by 10-20% and attract more investors. The aviation industry is provided as an example of how governance ensures aircrafts are built reliably through strict rules. Governance in IT focuses on policies, processes, and people roles. It is important to define policies, apply them at design time, and monitor compliance at runtime.

1. © WSO2 2012. Not for redistribution. Commercial in Confidence.
Subash Chaturanga
WSO2 Governance Registry
Enterprise Governance - The key to Success

2. Enterprise Governance - The key to Success
What is Governance ?
● It is the act of governing.
● In the context of IT goverannce,
○ It is a decision and accountability framework to encourage desirable behavior in an
enterprise.( Peter Weill and Joanne Ross)
Effective governance anticipates the needs and goals of both your organization's IT teams
and its business divisions
● What should be governed?
● Who should determine governance policies?
● How should governance be implemented?
●

3. Enterprise Governance - The key to Success
● Governance involves the process of creating a set of guidelines with which
your services need to comply.
● Create high-quality services that can be easily used by your consumers
and that behave exactly as expected.
● Governance isn't something exclusive to IT, it’s applied
throughout the industry

4. Enterprise Governance - The key to Success
Why Governance ?
● Statistics proves that firms with well exercised IT governance, who take governance as a
serious matter tend to have a relative 10-20 percent greater profit margins.
● Usually adherence to standards can only be achieved through a governance mechanism
● Investors always put their money behind companies that enforce high internal governance
standards
● So it is quite evident that strict governance standards has a direct impact to the bottom
line of any IT centralized enterprise.
● Investments in an asset is so important and
must be carefully manage.

5. Enterprise Governance - The key to Success
Responsibilities of Governance
● Strategic alignment
● Value Delivery
● Resource Management
● Risk management
● Performance Measurements.

6. Enterprise Governance - The key to Success
Example: Aviation industry
● What is the main purpose ?
○ Manufacture airplanes to meet market demands such that
those airplanes will are safe and do not drop out of the sky
regularly.
● Solution:
○ Proper Industry governance.
● How:
○ Every operation from construction, to maintenance, to flight monitoring happens under the defined
rules and regulations.
○ Every screw and bolt needs to be accounted for, and each sub component of the plane is validated
and end to end tested before it can be used in production.
● What needs to be done:
○ Industry uses a predefined set of strict governance guidelines (or policies) to control and verify that the
aircrafts are designed and created in a reliable and proper manner. In other words, an enterprise
governance framework to apply static/dynamic guidelines which behaves as exactly you expected.

7. Enterprise Governance - The key to Success
How people do this:
● Gather information from your industry stakeholders.
Once done, then
1. Define the policies to be applied.
2. Apply those policies in design time.
3. Monitor and enforce policies during runtime.

8. Enterprise Governance - The key to Success
Define the policies and applying them.
● In IT governance, besides the technical aspect of applying the policies defined, it is
also required to focus on the roles, processes and people who get involved, AKA 3
Ps.

9. Three Ps.
Policies
● All services must be
○ WS-I compliant
○ Tested.
○ Approved by the governance committee.
Processes
● Services are in general promoted from:
○ Design > Test > Staging >Production >Depreciation
○ Each step intercepted by an approval process.
People
● Each service has one or more technical and business owners.
● Access to create, read, modify promote services is restricted and controlled by users and groups.
● Access controlling should be hierarchical.
i.e defining the accounting team and give them access only to accounting services.
Enterprise Governance - The key to Success

10. Enterprise Governance - The key to Success
Monitor and enforce policies at runtime
● If the organization spent time on defining policies but does not have a way to check
whether they are followed, that time will be a waste.
i.e You want to measure the fuel consumption to check whether it’s within defined
range.
Example:
- Following is a policy that you want to apply on runtime
Force all the calls to your service to be done over HTTPS.

11. Enterprise Governance - The key to Success
IT Governance
● Whether you're providing social networking functionality through public REST
services or you're building an internal WS-* based services to provide accounting
information to another department, you have a number of challenges to deal with.
How IT governance helps you to:
● When your services not behaves as you intended..
○ Keeping track of how services are being used
Example:
Define and attach a lifecycle to your service.
- This will allow you to have a set of predefined phases/states for your service to go through.
- Enforce runtime policies
Check whether you service behaves as it’s suppose to be.
In to what extent it is being used.
Whether your service meets the expected performance.
When you have runtime policies in place which covers all aforementioned aspects, make the
struggling service details available in a dashboard.

12. Enterprise Governance - The key to Success
Continued : How IT governance helps you to:
● Keeping uniformity among services
○ Suppose you have five different teams in five different places who are developing five different
services. But as an organization you need to keep a level of uniformity across all the services
you have.
For that you have to:
- Define a set of design time policies
- Review services in different stage
- Create standard sub components reuse them
- Enforce policies at runtime.
● Do Impact Analysis
○ Identify the correlation among thousands of your enterprise
assets and make the correct decisions when rapid changes take
place in your system.

13. Questions ?