The Open Group has just released a  standard for SOA Governance (cfr SOA goes Global – ZDNet).

Earlier this year I had a look at the Open Group SOA Framework and especially the SGRM (SOA Governance Reference Model), finally at my customer we decided to follow the SOA Governance model of SOA Systems Inc (cfr http://www.soamethodology.com/).

The main difference between SOA systems and the Open Group is that SOA Systems tries to group SOA governance activities under the umbrella of one unique “governance cycle” while the Open Group distinguishes 4 governed processes:

- Solution Portfolio Management

- Solution Lifecycle

- Service Portfolio Management

- Service Lifecycle

I tend to prefer the decomposition of the Open Group, so I mapped the SOA Systems activities to the 4 types of processes in an Enterprise Architect Model. But this view was not so easy to grasp for beginners so I reverted to a straigth “SOA Systems” approach : one unique central SOA Governance process with swim-lanes.