The chapter describing the role of governance during the analysis phase of a project was an eye opener for me because I had this wrong impression that SOA governance applied only to the components that is used in a service oriented architecture. This, as I later found out, called run time governance where you monitor the services to ensure they consistently deliver according to the governing policies and metric collection process for each and every service. In the chapter that’s dedicated to run time governance, Todd describe how to define provider/consumer baselines and how to manage them.

After guiding the reader through all the aspects of SOA governance, what should be done and how you should go about doing those, Todd paints a picture of what does it look like when you have implemented all these steps successfully. Then he explains how one can implement SOA governance in his/her organization along with some common challenges that one might face.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this wonderfully well written book about SOA governance. You can read a sample chapter about service versioning here.