Spring Cleaning for SOA Governance

Jon Williams, blogging over at InfoWorld in his New York CTO blog, posted an entry on worthless process.  In it he talked about, for every process/project you need to think "will this make a difference to the business."

I have to say, I wholeheartedly agree with what he's saying - especially when applied to SOA governance policies.  For every policy you add, you should be able to clearly articulate it's value and impact on the business.  If you can't, then maybe you should reconsider adding it.

He goes on to say you also need to look at existing policies/processes/projects and do a spring cleaning of the ones that are no longer relevant.  How often do people assume that policies and processes that are already in-place are still relevant today?  It's been my experience that policies and processes never die.  "policy cruft" is certainly one of the things that turns good governance into a barrier to agility.

Remember, less is the new more.