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governance team to keep track of this and plot for future growth so needs are met just be-
fore they arise.
Facilitate services' life cycles
Facilitate services' life cycles
The governance team can see when services may need to be versioned, and assess the
impact of that versioning. Versioning is a more complex issue in SOA than in traditional
development because of its distributed nature. The person or team who develops a given
service may not have any clear view into the larger set of processes that now compose this
service. It is the job of the governance team to understand and prepare for this and oversee
its proper implementation.
Enable knowledge transfer
Enable knowledge transfer
The CoE can support the knowledge transfer effort. The learning curve on SOA and on
web services APIs and infrastructure can be considerable. Even if some members of your
team are not building services, they should be aware of the language and familiar with the
ideas in order to work in a complementary manner. Eventually such developers may move
on to create and consume services, and they need to be prepared to understand and follow
the guidelines laid out in the reference architecture.
Common pitfalls governance helps you avoid
Organizations that attempt SOA without governance in place can fall victim to a variety of
ailments, including total failure of the SOA initiative. There are a few common, avoidable pit-
falls.
You can't govern what you don't know about. So, to ensure that all of your service-related
code and documents are visible, implement a central repository that has the documents of re-
cord for each version of each service. This will help track these important documents during
design and runtime.
Service redundancy
A common pitfall, particularly within large or decentralized organizations, is service redund-
ancy or overlap. The same or similar service is repeatedly created throughout different groups
in the enterprise. This is expensive, wasteful, and confusing. As a result you can find yourself
with sharply increased maintenance costs. It is the job of the CoE to prevent this by monitor-
ing what's getting developed, encouraging collaboration between implementation teams, and
establishing and using a centralized repository for service discovery.
Sundry artifacts
On a practical level, ensure that governance is in place to manage the many new kinds of ar-
tifacts that SOA can introduce, such as WSDLs, schemas, SCA configurations, policies, and
