According to a new survey from the SOA Forum, organizations frequently implement Web services without performing any type of compliance review, and those that are examined are typically subject to inconsistent or undocumented manual processes rather than a more rigorous, automated review.

The survey, conducted online, was sent to all members of the SOA Forum, a global forum of technical professionals from Fortune 500 companies and Government agencies. More than 500 responses were received.

Survey findings include:

• 88 percent of respondents feel their current SOA governance is not sufficient
• 85 percent of companies depend on manual reviews in design and development stages to try to achieve architectural governance
• 80 percent of companies feel that their organization is at measurable or large negative risk due to putting services in production that are not effectively governed
• Significant dissatisfaction was reported when a registry/repository is deployed without policy management and automated enforcement
• 56 percent report that half of their services are not reviewed for compliance at all before moving into production
• By contrast, of those who had automated the governance process, all of them said they are able to check at least 75 percent of their artifacts for compliance, and one-third check 100 percent of their code and artifacts for compliance prior to implementation.

The SOA Forum was founded by and is coordinated by WebLayers, Inc. To download a free executive summary of the survey findings, titled, "The SOA Forum: 2007 Survey on SOA Governance," visit the SOA Forum Website at http://weblayers.com/theSOAforum/survey.htm.