Governance: the Cornerstone of SOA Success

IBM is announcing a new, comprehensive methodology for SOA governance -- a series of policies and processes for ensuring successful SOA projects. This methodology is based on IBM's experience with SOA customers worldwide, consults at IBM's 11 Global Centers of SOA Excellence, and the company's own, internal deployment of SOA.

IBM continues to advance the SOA governance capabilities that customers want and need. The new WebSphere Registry and Repository (WSRR) software helps customers manage web services and shared business processes across a four stage lifecycle: discovery, service development, change and release management, and operational efficiency and resilience. WSRR builds upon the enhanced Rational BuildForge, Rational ClearQuest and Rational Software Architect offerings for software development, governed service build and delivery, and architectural analysis.

To promote reuse and eliminate redundancies, the WSSR allows clients to publish and find services and related metadata through all stages of SOA and also supports integration and federation with other standard registries and repositories. To enrich SOA runtime interaction, the WSRR enables optimized access to service metadata and manage service interactions and policies. And finally, to gain better control of SOA with governance, the WSRR facilitates service lifecycle with guards for state transitions, analyzes impacts of service introduction, deletion or alteration by maintaining relationships and manages role-based access to services, changes, versioning and service retirement.

Gary E. Smith
SOA Governance Architect