Despite the lack of standards and business cases, SOA governance continues to gain ground, thanks to its promise of allowing the business unit to wield control of IT through policy enforcement.

On Monday, registry vendor Systinet unveiled the Governance Interoperability Framework (GIF), an initiative that has the support of 10 Web services vendors that specialize in areas such as management, security, integration and business intelligence.

"The GIF is the first attempt to provide a standard product to get one view of your policies and all your service descriptions," said David Butler, vice president of marketing at Burlington, Mass.-based Systinet Corp.