P.A.T. van Eck

A lifecycle approach to SOA governance

Due to the distributed nature of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), maintaining control in a SOA environment becomes more difficult as services spread over different lines-of-business. The concept of SOA governance has emerged as a way to implement control mechanisms in a SOA. In this paper we identify a lifecycle based approach for executing SOA governance. This approach consists of defining a SOA strategy, aligning the organization, managing the service portfolio, controlling the service lifecycle, enforcing policies and managing service levels. By incorporating a maturity model in this approach, it is possible to minimize the required effort while still having sufficient governance. From a series of interviews that have been carried out we could conclude that most current SOA projects - although relatively limited in their scope - raise governance issues that need to be addressed to prevent future problems.

Validating Adequacy and Suitability of Business-IT Alignment Criteria in an Inter-Enterprise Maturity Model 202

Aligning requirements of a business with its information technology is currently a major issue in enterprise computing. Existing literature indicates important criteria to judge the level of alignment between business and IT within a single enterprise. However, identifying such criteria in an inter-enterprise setting - or re-thinking the existing ones - is hardly addressed at all. Business-IT alignment in such settings poses new challenges, as in inter-enterprise collaborations, alignment is driven by economic processes instead of centralized decision-making processes. In our research, we develop a maturity model for business-IT alignment in inter-enterprise settings that takes this difference into account. In this paper, we report on a multi-method approach we devised to confront the validation of the business-IT alignment criteria that we included in the maturity model. As independent feedback is critical for our validation, we used a focus group session and a case study as instruments to take the first step in validating the business-IT alignment criteria. We present how we applied our approach, what we learnt, and what the implications were for our model.