A new initiative goes beyond managing service assets in a registry IBM expanded its SOA governance efforts last Wednesday with new products and services, including a Rational plug-in and a Business Consulting Services program focusing on best practices. The company says it believes SOA governance has been defined too narrowly as the managing of services in a registry.“What we want to first establish is that SOA governance is a lot more about helping people define roles and responsibilities and decision rights, and helping organizations establish policies and measurements,” said Roger Oberg, vice president of marketing and strategy at IBM Rational.That’s a fair characterization, according to one analyst. “IBM has a good, broad, appropriate definition of SOA governance,” said Randy Heffner, an analyst at Forrester Research.As part of the IBM Business Consulting Services program, IBM is unveiling SOA Governance and Management Method. The program provides consulting to map requirements, policies and business plans for SOA. “For SOA governance, we’ve never codified or documented [best practices] in this way before,” Oberg said.Software being unveiled includes the SOA Governance plug-in for IBM Rational Method Composer. With the plug-in, governance practices are packaged as a reusable asset and are delivered via Rational Method Composer, which features processes and tools for IT lifecycle management. Also part of its wide-reaching effort is IBM Rational Data Architect, for enforcing corporate and industry standards on data models and helping to govern SOA-compliant information architectures. Software Development