Building an SOA can be challenging, even agonizing. Sometimes ideas that look good on paper are not so good in practice. Many actually turn out to be worst practices. This white paper illustrates what to learn from others' SOA governance mistakes.

This white paper is a collection of dubious--and sometimes disastrous--case studies of SOA governance implementations. Each scenario describes and analyzes the critical SOA errors and lessons learned, and corrective possibilities such as:

• Taking an integrated approach to planning for security, management and governance policies and processes
• Aligning the goals of IT and business stakeholders from the start of the SOA and individual services
• Institutionalizing SOA governance throughout the development cycle and particularly across organizational "silos"