Challenges of governance approaches for service-oriented architectures

Abstract

IT Systems in companies nowadays are confronted with constantly changing market conditions, new competitive threats and an increasing number of legal regulations. The service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm provides a promising way to address these challenges at the level of the company's IT infrastructure. These challenges and the management of the introduced complexity and heterogeneity are targeted by SOA Governance approaches. Hereby, the basic structure of IT Governance frameworks is applicable to SOA; however, they lack applicability concerning some SOA-specific challenges. In this paper, we discuss deficiencies and provide insights of what regulation challenges a SOA Governance approach is actually required to be capable of, in particular in the area of service lifecycles and service marketplaces.