SOA landscapes today look very much like fractals. An organization may have several internal capabilities presented as reusable services that connect to each other. It may even connect to 3rd party and/or cloud based services. But if you drill down into each of these services, you’ll likely see a composite application that is made up of several finer grained services interconnected together. And as a math geek, I am naturally curious about all things related to fractals.

In fact the fractal pattern appears in almost anything that’s responsible for connecting things together: highway and road systems, power grids, the internet… the list goes on. In all of these systems, there exists a hierarchical system of management and governance to regulate its functionality. Each country, for example, have national standards and regulatory bodies that define how power is to be exchanged, managed, and consumed. At the regional levels, there are additional standards and regulatory bodies that deal with region-specific decisions such as how much power to generate, pricing, and what equipment is to be installed where. Similar structures are true for transportation and telecommunications. So why is it that most organizations see SOA governance as an all-encompassing enterprise wide responsibility?

The interaction requirements and lifecycle characteristics of enterprise level composite services or business processes are very different from those of a utility service. To paint the entire enterprise service landscape with an uniform set of standards and processes will either result in a high number of exceptions or a lowest common denominator scenario. To be effective, an organization’s SOA governance model must match its SOA deployment model. The governance model must exist not just at the top, but at a granularity that matches how the services are being deployed and managed. Service Portfolio Managers, then are not just another role within the governance model, but micro versions of governance domains themselves. Service Portfolio Managers must be allowed to define their own standards and processes that are appropriate for the specific services that they’re responsible for. The SOA governance model for the enterprise must consider what standards and processes are appropriate for all services, which are appropriate for only the ones being consumed across the enterprise, and which ones should be left up to the Portfolios to govern themselves.