At a basic level, an SOA governance system should facilitate governance across the service lifecycle from design time to run-time to change time. It should allow polices to be defined and created, and provide mechanisms for these policies to be enforced at each phase of the service lifecycle. (See Figure 1)

The main components of this system include:

• A registry that acts as a central catalog of business services
• A repository for storing policies and other metadata related to the governance of the services
• Policy enforcement points, which are the agents that enact the actual policy enforcement and control at design time, run-time, and change time
• A rules engine for managing the declaration of policies and rules and automating their enforcement
• An environment for configuring and defining policies and for managing governance workflows across the service lifecycle