Roles & Responsibilities
Defining organizational structures is mandatory in bringing discipline to the decision-making process. These organizational structures will include various business, domain, and technology groups/boards/committees. The responsibility of identifying roles within these structures and assigning them unambiguous responsibilities and accountability lies with a central SOA governance committee.

Examples of the structures and roles include:

Business
Business Process Streamlining Committee - Will be responsible for working closely with different business units to understand process streamlining/automation opportunities in a particular domain. For example, the customer service domain (examples of business units would be retail banking and investment banking for individuals). This committee will deliver a Process Plan outlining the processes to be streamlined and automated.

Cost-Benefit Analysis Committee - Will be responsible for assessing the service enablement/sharing of business functionalities from the perspective of business benefits, cost involved, and ROI. This report will be input to the Process Owners Committee.

Process Owners Committee - This committee (domain-specific) will involve people from different business units. This committee will be responsible for approving/rejecting the plan for service enablement/sharing of business functionalities.

Domain
Customer Service Domain Architect Group - The Process Plan will be input to the Domain Architect group. This group will be responsible for delivering detailed processes blueprint identifying common reusable assets across processes. This processes blueprint will act as an input to the Cost-Benefit Analysis Committee and Process Owners Committee

Customer Service Domain Analyst Group - Will be responsible for identifying or defining enterprise canonical semantic standards to be used by the business services.

Customer Service Interface Committee - Will be accountable for approving the semantic standards and their use by business services.

Technology
SOA Center of Excellence - Will be responsible for carrying out following activities

• Support the project/product teams with design and development of business services, composite applications, etc.
• Mentor the project/product teams on SOA-enabling technologies and standards (BPEL, ESB, Web Services)
• Develop best practices and guidelines
• Proof of concept (PoC) execution
• Build a pool of resources capable of executing SOA projects and programs
• Provide thought leadership and technology direction

Architecture-Design Standards Board - Will be responsible for identifying emerging trends and standards related to Web Services-SOA.

SOA Standards Review Board - Will be responsible for approving/rejecting architecture-design standards.

Once the Governance Model is in place, an organization needs to focus on its implementation. An organization won't find a single vendor or tool capable of implementing the governance solution; it might have to work on custom framework development and the integration of different governance tools to realize the Governance Model.

Conclusion
Organizations are in the initial stages of adopting SOA governance. Without effective governance, the ability of SOA to scale will impede. Therefore it's vital to establish a sound Governance Model addressing the various challenges surrounding SOA discipline. This will help organizations to adopt SOA successfully by establishing process discipline, controlling decision-making, ensuring smooth collaboration, and addressing cultural/behavioral issues. SOA governance is complex. As SOA evolves, an organization needs to evolve its Governance Model to address the new set of challenges. A well-defined Governance Model will lay the foundation for SOA success.