It seems to me that there is an inherent conflict between what some pundits claim are essential practices for SOA Governance - and the core business driver of organizational agility.
Forcing every service through a Governance Committee Review process - before it can be deployed to production - is probably one draconian extreme.
Allowing any application development team to publish any service end-point without being vetted is probably the other extreme.
The level of maturity (or lack thereof) of the Registry/Repository products that I have reviewed is laughable. I would sincerely like to know of one single organization that has actually implemented non-trivial SOA Governance policies in their Registry/Repository mechanism - using the features provide by a vendor's core product capabilities.
Whether you do a Top-Down SOA design, a Bottom-Up, or work up/down from the middle, it seems to me that you are going to have pain. Either as a product of the upfront analysis effort (causing delays before your SOA efforts produce any measurable ROI), or as a product of the chaos created by hordes of poorly designed services sprouting like wild flowers across the enterprise.
Draconion SOA Governance processes may mitigate some of the pain - but at the cost of organizational agility.
The Noble Truth of Suffering is this: Birth is suffering, ageing is suffering, sickness is suffering, death is suffering; sorrows and lamentation, pain, grief and despair are suffering; association with the unpleasant is suffering, dissociation from the pleasant is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering – in short, the five aggregates of attachment are suffering.
Pali Tripitaka, Buddhist collection of sacred texts, Sutta-Nipata
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In harmony with my natural tendency to follow Buddhist and Taoist practices, I have chosen to lead my current SOA project down the middle path. We will embrace business agility as a First Principle, and leverage a custom-built SOA Governance Metrics Reporting subsystem to help us monitor the usage of services across the enterprise.
