In this paper we focus on two applications of IT governance:

• Governance of IT processes such as those found in the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) or Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (CobiT) standards
• Governance of business processes supported by IT

Governance at its essence is about decision-making and communications. The need for good governance stems from the need of organizations to make good decisions and communicate them effectively. Often, when faced with poor outcomes, the organization needs to review how the decisions were made and put in place structures that support better decisions going forward. These decisions can be large, such as whether to invest in a new initiative or approve an annual report; or the decision can be routine, such as whether to provide access to sensitive data or include software code in a release.

As IT has matured, the emergence of service orientation and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has presented a new set of governance challenges. The modularity and efficiencies enabled by service orientation provide the means to do both good and harm more quickly. The agility of SOA requires an organization to be more deliberate in its decision-making, a capability that is perhaps the true benefit of effective governance. Organizations adopting SOA need not only apply governance to the service artifact lifecycle processes, but also need to consider the impact of SOA on all IT governance sub-disciplines, such as portfolio governance or data governance. This resetting of IT governance for IT organizations adopting SOA is called SOA governance.

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