Challenges of governance approaches for service-oriented architectures

IT Systems in companies nowadays are confronted with constantly changing market conditions, new competitive threats and an increasing number of legal regulations. The service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm provides a promising way to address these challenges at the level of the company´s IT infrastructure. These challenges and the management of the introduced complexity and heterogeneity are targeted by SOA Governance approaches. Hereby, the basic structure of IT Governance frameworks is applicable to SOA; however, they lack applicability concerning some SOA-specific challenges. In this paper, we discuss deficiencies and provide insights of what regulation challenges a SOA Governance approach is actually required to be capable of, in particular in the area of service lifecycles and service marketplaces.