V. CONCLUSIONS
SOA governance has a critical role in achieving success and realizing the benefits of SOA. A number of SOA governance frameworks have been proposed. Our analysis shows that they do not completely address all imperative elements of SOA governance such as SOA roadmap, service portfolio and governance performance assessment metrics. In this paper, in the process of proposing a new framework, we have presented generic and critical elements of SOA governance. We believe that using these factors increases the chance of selecting a good SOA governance framework. By using these elements, some well-known SOA governance frameworks have been compared. Also, we have considered COBIT as a comprehensive IT governance framework in our comparison. In spite of the fact that SOA governance is essentially different from IT governance, COBIT is a well accepted framework that has been implemented by many companies, and is based on IT service management approach. It also completely addresses some critical elements such as governance structure and evaluation processes, and provides some guidance for SOA governance frameworks. Therefore, we have developed AUT SOA governance framework based on COBIT to address governance in the context of SOA.
The proposed framework is a more comprehensive and expressive framework with focus on SOA governance elements that is obtained by defining SOA processes and activities, governance structure, control as the policies and procedures embedded in each process and also providing metrics and maturity model.