Our topic this week centers on governance as a requirement and an enabler for cloud computing. We’re going to talk not just about IT governance, or service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance. It’s really more about extended enterprise processes, resource consumption, and resource-allocation governance.

Here to help us understand the need for governance as an enabler or a roadblock to wider cloud adoption are our analyst guests this week. We’re here with David A. Kelly, president of Upside Research; Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst from ZapThink; and, Joe McKendrick, independent analyst and ZDNet blogger.

Let’s start with you Ron. You’ve been involved with SOA best practices and methodologies for several years. Before that, you were a thought leader in the Web services space, and governance has been part and parcel of these advances. Now, we’re taking it to an extended environment, a larger, more complex environment. Tell me, if you would, your top five reasons why you think services governance is critical or not for this move to a larger services environment.

Ron Schmelzer: You’re making me count on a Friday before a long weekend. Let me see if I can do that. I’m glad you brought up this topic. It’s really interesting. We just did a survey of the various topics that people are interested in for education, training, and stuff like that. The No. 1 thing that people came back with was governance. That’s indicative and telling at a few levels.

The first thing people realize is that simply building and putting out services — whether they’re on the local network or in the cloud or consuming services from the cloud — don’t provide the benefit, unless there’s some control. As people always say, nobody really wants to be ungoverned, but nobody wants to have a government. The thing that prevents freedom from going into chaos is governance.

I can list Click here to get the Free Email Design No-No’s Guide from Lyris — includes the top 10 things you need to know. the top five reasons why that is. You want the benefit of loose coupling. That is, you want the benefit of being able to take any service and compose it with any other service without necessarily having to get the service provider involved. That’s the whole theory of loose coupling. The consumer and the provider don’t have to directly communicate.

But the problem is how to prevent people from combining these services in ways that provide unpredictable or undesirable results. A lot of the efforts in governance from the runtime prevents that unpredictability. So one, preventing chaos. …

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