A good summary of this issue is a post by Nick Malik, I thought Nick caught the essence of the issue.

"So your CIO says 'build SOA.' You do a search and plop down your hard earned cash on a SOA Governance tool. Do you now have what you need for SOA Governance? Nope."

"The whole point of SOA is to create an agile environment, making it easier to build fully integrated applications from the get-go. This is the goal. If your services don't allow you to build service oriented applications, then you have wasted your money and time. Governance is about making sure you don't waste your time and money by building the services you don't need, or failing to build the services you do need."

Nick goes on to define the activities which are included in SOA governance, highlighting only 3 of the activities that are solved by SOA governance technology today: