Service Oriented Architecture is a complicated endeavor: it provides great flexibility in implementing business functionality at the cost of additional management and oversight.

Some part of that additional management responsibility falls on the shoulders of a new breed of software - the composite application, which is made up of services combined into processes. What used to take place in a single application now takes place across a network where messages inform services and processes control functionality.

But there's another set of management tasks that don't have software realization - they fall squarely in the lap of human management. We usually refer to these tasks as SOA governance.