Hi Jason, I hope your doing well, I was there at Dubai Zapthink session, am facing a very critical two questions in my SOA project:

1- What is exactly “SOA Governance Model” how does it look like (any sample), what are main components, templates to do it, approach…etc and when in SOA project is should its occurrence take place?

2- 1- What is exactly “SOA Reference Model” how does it look like (any sample), what are main components, templates to do it, approach…etc and when in SOA project is should its occurrence take place?

Your help is highly appreciated……..

Yasir2000, I understand that these questions were directed at Jason, but kindly allow me to answer them. I believe Jason will further elaborate or

1. An SOA Governance Model should include guiding principles, governed processes, process activities, process artifacts, and roles & responsibilities. Therefore it extends the existing IT and EA Governance models of the organization.

An SOA governance lifecycle should go through 4 phases: plan, define, execute/enable, and monitor/measure.

An SOA governance normally comes into the project sphere the moment you start modelling a service(s). This will ensure that services created adhere to governance policies.

For samples, refer to the Open Group and AgilePath, which are vendor & technology neutral. Others which tend to be technology specific or built around their toolsets are IBM, Sun Microsystems, just to name a few.

2- 1- The primary contribution of a SOA Reference Model is that it identifies the key characteristics of SOA, and it defines many of the important concepts needed to understand what SOA is, what makes it important and provides common semantics that can be used unambiguously across and between different implementations.

The most comprehensive reference model should be that of OASIS. You can download it from http://www.oasis-open.org

I hope this will be of assistance to you.