A Comprehensive 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 predictable 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, we propose a new framework named AUT SOA governance framework based on COBIT that is more comprehensive and expressive than its counterparts. The proposed framework is obtained by enforcing control and governance aspects of COBIT and applying service management activities into a lifecycle approach. This framework is a perceptible framework that clarifies all processes, their relationships, related roles and responsibilities and measurement metrics and promotes control and policy enforcement by defining management control objectives. Also, imperative elements of SOA governance that existing frameworks do not cover them completely specially, service portfolio management, SOA roadmap, performance metrics and evaluation processes have been completely added and described in this framework.