Planning Governance - Build the Right Services

Planning Governance is an important part of an Integrated SOA Governance Automation solution that allows companies to build to plan and build to priority, modeling current and desired architectures and identifying and prioritizing candidate services.  Planning Governance solutions maximize the efficiency of investment in SOA, solidifying the role of existing platforms as foundation service providers.

I.T. has always struggled with balancing long term planning with addressing the immediate and short term needs of the business, in most cases the short term requirements take precedent over long range planning.  When this is applied to enterprise architecture, organizations end up with a bunch of services that deliver minimal business value, instead of their goal of SOA.       
               
Planning governance includes the identification analysis and modeling of candidate services, policies, profiles, processes and information.  An effective planning governance tool manages an organization’s SOA portfolio while examining existing and planned applications and determining which capabilities should be exposed as services, and where applications benefit from consuming shared services.

Planning Governance allows organizations to identify potential services in a planned and managed community including enterprise architects, business analysts and portfolio managers. When utilizing planning governance, services can be proactively built to plan rather than simply reacting and building single use services. This approach reduces the risks of service deployment and facilitates Enterprise Architectural goals by avoiding chaotic service sprawl.

Planning Governance solutions require integration with a wide range of existing enterprise repositories, application portfolio management, and enterprise architecture planning solutions, to harvest current and desired architectures.  The output from the Planning Governance process is a set of candidate services that feed into the Development Governance process, and candidate policies feeding into the Policy Governance process.

Register to download the SOA Software Portfolio Manager Data Sheet, the SOA Planning Governance White Paper and other resources.