Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) governance, consisting of creating, communicating, and enforcing the policies that apply to the design, deployment, and management of Services, is one of the most critical, yet confusing, part of an effective SOA plan. One of the reasons why SOA governance is so important, as well as challenging, is that SOA teams must govern the entire Service lifecycle, not just as the team models and develops the Services at design time, but also as they deploy and manage them at run time, and reconfigure and recompose them at change time.

An important part of the SOA infrastructure for enabling SOA governance is the registry/repository. Today’s registry/repositories are fully featured SOA metadata management solutions that coordinate policy activities and enable policy enforcement across the Service lifecycle. As organizations roll out their SOA initiatives, it is important to consider SOA governance as one of the initial steps, and a registry/repository is often the most important, first piece of SOA infrastructure to put in place.