Corporate governance

Corporate, or enterprise governance, establishes the rules and the manner in
which an enterprise conducts business, based upon its strategy, marketplace,
and principles of doing business. It defines for employees and for business
associates the processes that are used to conduct operations and the manner in
which people interact.
Beginning with the board of directors and extending throughout the organization,
there are many aspects and levels of corporate governance. All aspects of the
business are touched in some manner. Governance is applied to major
functional areas of an organization. Organizations govern their financial assets,
human resources, customer relations, intellectual property portfolio, and their
Information Technology.

Quote of the day: It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. – Aristotle

IT governance

IT governance is broader than SOA governance and refers specifically to the
aspects of governance that pertain to an organization’s information technology
processes and the way that those processes support the goals of the business.
Given the horizontal nature of IT, where almost everyone in the enterprise uses
IT assets to complete their responsibilities, IT governance represents a
significant part of corporate governance. IT governance as a subset of corporate
governance deals with the management and control of IT assets, people,
processes and infrastructures, as well as the manner in which the assets are
managed and procured. IT governance also helps to define roles and
responsibilities and to specify the decision rights and the accountabilities that will
help to encourage desirable behavior in IT departments and establish
accountability for the use of IT assets. IT governance also helps to define and
realize best practices. For more information about the assignment of decision
rights and measures for IT processes, consider those defined by Control
Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT):
http://www.itgi.org

SOA governance

SOA governance identifies the changes to IT governance to ensure that the
concepts and principles for service orientation and its distributed architecture are
managed appropriately and that services are able to deliver on the business
goals.
SOA governance addresses how an organization’s IT governance decision
rights, policies, processes, and measures need to be modified and augmented
for the successful adoption of SOA, thus forming an effective SOA governance
model. SOA governance provides an essential framework for achieving
functional and nonfunctional (security, reliability, and performance)
interoperability of services across line of business boundaries.
Because of its cross-functional and organizational aspects, SOA governance
also provides a framework for examining several items necessary to manage
services as another type of IT asset, such as:
Maturity of service orientation within the enterprise
Infrastructure enhancements for managing the usage of services in areas of
security, monitoring, performance, versioning, and shared usage
Enhancements to IT processes to address funding, sharing, incentives for
sharing, and reuse of services, as well as for the identification, design, and
specification of services
Education and training
Roles and responsibilities
Organizational changes
SOA governance enhances IT governance by assigning decision rights, policies,
and measures around the services, processes, and life cycle of SOA to address
such concerns as:
Service registration
Service versioning
Service ownership
Service funding
Implementing Technology to Support SOA Governance and Management
Service monitoring
Service auditing
Service diagnostics
Service identification
Service modeling
Service publishing
Service discovery
Service development
Service consumption
Service provisioning
Access to services
Deployment of services and composite applications
Security for services

Excerpted from

Implementing Technology to Support SOA
Governance and Management

IBM Redbooks