As service-oriented architecture (SOA) moves from early-adopters to mainstream corporate initiatives, companies are challenged to quickly achieve their intended goals of business agility and cost savings from service reuse. As the primary advocate of SOA within a company, the SOA architect is tasked keeping these goals in perspective while implementing technology and more importantly, processes that will drive the changes needed to make SOA impactful to a business across multiple organizational (and sometimes geographic) boundaries.

• Ensuring Interoperability
• Validating SOA results - having proof of success
• Creating incentives for reuse of services
• Promoting the availability of services
• Socializing the Trust and reuse of existing services
• Making services accessible and understandable
• Avoiding rogue/redundant services
• Development delays
• Poor service performance - SLAs
• Integration Support for services being implemented
• Lack of SOA expertise across organization
• Applying the right amount of governance - too much vs too little
• Communicating and enforcing custom/corporate policies
• Accessibility of SOA assets by multiple teams
• Collaboration among multiple teams and disparate projects

Successful SOA architects understand that ROI is not based on a technology platform, infrastructure or implementation but rather on SOA governance initiatives that result in quality, trust and control among various participants. They also understand that SOA is dramatically different from traditional enterprise application environments with unique challenges and issues posed by the always-on, shared services traits of SOA and the potential impact of changes to services or applications.

SOA Requires Governance From Day One.
Web Services built for use within a SOA are enterprise assets that will stay with companies for years to come if the service and composite applications leveraging services perform as intended. As small, pilot projects are used to validate the need an effectiveness of SOA in an organization, it is critical to apply governance processes in your pilot and every other early stage project.