SOA Governance

Managing the development of service oriented architectures will be very different from managing single application developments. For one thing, architects will need to coordinate the development fo services across the business, while juggling an alignment of their IT strategy with the overal business strategy. It's important to think about this issue - and there's an interesting paper in Microsoft's Architecture Journal from Richard Veryard and Philp Boxer on "Metropolis and SOA Governance".

Summary: In the service economy, we expect service-oriented systems to emerge that are increasingly large and complex, but that are also capable of behaviors that are increasingly differentiated. As we shall see, this is one of the key challenges of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and is discussed in this article.

It fits quite nicely with a piece I wrote for the Guardian back in March: The SimCity Way.

Managing software development in a large organisation can be tricky. IT directors need to juggle scarce resources while delivering applications and services that respond to business needs. It is a complex task, and one that often looks more like managing a portfolio of investments - or playing a particularly complicated game of SimCity.