As the field of service-oriented architecture (SOA) evolves, it brings interesting challenges that should be addressed in order to drive its adoption and realize the benefits it has been promising. It took a while for many to understand that SOA is not purely a technology issue.

SOA is an IT strategy and it requires a shift in the way we think about how IT is aligned with business and how an organization can support and drive SOA within the enterprise. The popular IS Strategy Triangle framework emphasizes the need for alignment between business, IT and organizational strategies.[1] Figure 1 shows the extension of the IS Strategy Triangle and how SOA fits in. Business strategy should drive the SOA strategy, which is an IS/IT Strategy and SOA strategy must support the business strategy.

In order for the SOA strategy to be effective, the organizational capabilities and processes should be aligned with the business and SOA strategies. A number of surveys have identified SOA organization and governance-related issues as a top inhibitor for SOA adoption.

Effective adoption of SOA requires changes to the traditional structure and processes of an organization. The implementation of SOA strategy might introduce new organizations, governance bodies, roles, responsibilities, and other governance issues. It may change the way business capabilities are built and rolled out to the business. These changes introduce challenges around the ownership of assets. The purpose of this article is to develop a framework for identifying ownership issues around SOA assets. Every organization’s culture and organizational capabilities are different. The framework discussed in this article is generic enough to be customized for any organization.

The effectiveness of the governance processes depend very much on the definition of roles, the clarity around the ownership of assets and processes, and the degree of empowerment of the governing bodies. SOA introduces several challenges around the ownership of SOA assets for a couple of reasons:

1. Services are built to address enterprise concerns. Individual business units no longer own all parts of a service, as doing so would completely defeat the purpose and benefits of SOA. The decisions made around SOA should be based on the best interests of the whole enterprise, not the interests of one particular group within the enterprise.
2. Services are made up of several parts that are generally distributed in nature. This distribution is multi-dimensional. For example, a service may span physical (deployed across several hardware layers) and organizational boundaries (different organizations may be involved in the development and deployment of the service).

When determining the ownership of SOA services, it’s important to clarify the purpose of identifying ownership, and to understand the underlying assets exposed and the boundaries around services.