Structuring SOA Governance

Companies’ IT Systems are confronted with constantly changing market conditions, new competitive threats and a growing number of legal regulations. The service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm provides a promising way to address these challenges at the level of a company’s IT infrastructure. These challenges, as well as the management of the newly introduced complexity and heterogeneity, are targeted by SOA Governance approaches. In recent years, a number of concrete frameworks for SOA Governance addressing these issues have been proposed. There is no holistic approach considering all proposed elements, consolidating them in order to form a universally applicable model. In this contribution, we motivate SOA Governance, investigate and compare different approaches, identify common concepts, and derive a generic model for governance of Service-oriented Architectures. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-1779-7.ch004