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As enterprises move to implement Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), they increasingly recognize that SOA will only meet its potential if it can be governed well. SOA Governance responds to this crucial realization. In this book, a team of IBM's leading SOA governance experts share hard-won best practices for effectively governing IT in any service-oriented environment. The authors begin by reviewing SOA's promised benefits, and identifying inadequate governance as a root cause when SOA fails. Next, they introduce a comprehensive SOA governance model that works. They define what must be governed, identify key stakeholders, and review the relationship of SOA governance to existing governance bodies, and to processes like CoBIT and ITIL. In Part II, they walk through SOA governance assessment and planning, helping readers identify and fix gaps, set goals and objectives, and establish workable roadmaps. Finally, they turn to the details of 'building out' an SOA governance model: establishing authority chains, roles, responsibilities, policies, standards, mechanisms, procedures, and metrics. Along the way, the authors illuminate the unique issues associated applying IT governance to a services model - including the challenges of compliance auditing where service behavior can be unpredictable. They also show why services governance requires a more organizational, business-centric focus than 'conventional' IT governance - and how to successfully achieve that focus.