The foundation of a governance program consists of a mission and guiding principles.  The mission should state what you hope to achieve in the program while the principles help to guide you there.

Every organization adopts SOA Governance differently, however there are common questions that each organization can ask itself:

1. Are we policy setters, policy enforcers, or both?

2. Is more governance better? Is less governance better?

3. Will we encourage behaviour through positive or negative incentives (carrot or stick)?

4. Will our governance be centralized or decentralize?

5. Will we describe our governance via policies (rules) or procedures (steps to take)?

6. Can we prove that our governance program is working? Will we have metrics?

7. Will policies be defined by the people who have to live with them or by Ivory Tower participants?

8. Will we have people dedicated to goverance (shared center)?

9. How will we keep people from going around the governance activities? 

10. How will we promote tolerance (over governance)?

11. What will our policy lifecycle look like (conceptualize, create, communicate, enforce, correct, etc.)?

12. What kind of policies are we interested in: (Technical policies, Security policies, Business policies, Regulatory policies, Development process policies,
Reuse policies, Funding policies, etc.)?

13. To what extent will we use tooling/infrastructure to automate our governance program? (plan time, design time, provision/run time)?

14. How will we get visibility into the state of the governance efforts? How will we know if policies are being followed?

The answer to these questions will provide a framework to guide you through the development of your goverance program. Their purpose is to provide a guiding direction for the details of each governance work stream.