AUT SOA governance: A new SOA governance framework based on COBIT

SOA governance has a critical role in achieving success and realizing the benefits of SOA. Without effective SOA governance, organizations will experience some significant challenges including difficulties in designing effective decision structures and building a SOA roadmap, lack of service funding, lack of consistent governance processes and gap between IT and business. Study of existing SOA governance frameworks reveals that these frameworks do not completely document SOA processes, governance procedures and SOA roadmap, and also they are not expressive enough to cover all important elements of SOA governance. Therefore, in this paper, an enhanced and comprehensive SOA governance framework is designed, capable of providing more coverage of SOA governance elements such as governance structure and service lifecycle processes. The proposed framework is obtained by enforcing governance structures of COBIT and applying service management activities into a lifecycle approach. The proposed framework has been tested by comparing analysis with empirically measured values of SOA governance elements and analyzing with a comprehensive qualitative model. This framework offers a well-defined, structured set of aspects that an SOA governance framework should include and can delivers a comprehensive solution to help enable effective SOA governance.