Service Inventory for Gathering and Publishing

As stated previously, governance is a collection of processes and agreements that have to live in the minds, and preferably the hearts, of many different stakeholders involved in the architecture, planning, design, implementation, testing, and administration of service-oriented artifacts such as Web Services, canonical data models, and events. These processes together have to enable the organization to achieve the objectives with SOA, such as agility through decoupling and reuse.

Implementing governance is, to a large extent, a matter of communication, building awareness and involvement, making information available about procedures and reusable artifacts, collaborating on the creation of services and the design of the canonical model, and so on. Many of these governance processes require registration and publication of metadata about these processes themselves as well as about artifacts and dependencies between the assets. Various approaches and tools can be adopted for the management of this metadata—some simple DIY tools, others more formal, such as UDDI directories (for example, the Service Registry), or even a full-blown enterprise-level system like the Oracle Enterprise Repository (OER).