A Design Science Approach to Develop a New Comprehensive SOA Governance Framework

SOA governance has a critical role in achieving success and realizing the benefits of SOA. Without effective SOA governance, organizations will experience some significant challenges including difficultiesin designing effective decision structures and managing services. To address SOA challenges, organizations require a comprehensive SOA governance framework to implement management and control mechanisms. Study of existing frameworks reveals that these frameworks are not expressive enough to cover all elements of SOA governance and also, they do not completely document underpinning structuressuch as processes, procedures, responsibilities and measurement metrics. In this paper, we propose a new SOA governance framework that is more comprehensive and expressive than its counterparts. In the process of developing the framework, a set of important elements for a desired SOA governance framework is proposed. Based on these elements, a new SOA governance framework is developed. The proposed framework is obtained by extending characteristics of COBIT and applying ITIL service lifecycle activitiesto support the SOA governance principles and requirements. It is a perceptible framework that clarifies all processes, activities, metrics and other related elements in a logical structure. Also, to simplify the application of the framework, an implementation process is proposed.