We'll be doing a reprise of the SOA governance panel at the SOA Executive Forum on May 16th in New York. The panelists will be:

• Ed Vazquez of Sprint-Nextel. Ed's the Group Manager of the Web Service Integrations & SOA.
• Jeff Schneider of MomentumSI
• Johannes Viegener of Software AG. Johannes is Vice President of the R&D Crossvision Suite
• Michael Hill of HP. Mike is the Global Director for Enterprise Architecture & Governance

This should be a great panel. Ed and Jeff were on the panel in March and did a bang up job. I've heard good things about both Johannes and Mike.

Like last time, the panel will be run with a strict moratorium on PowerPoint slides. I'll spend 3-5 minutes introducing the subject, give each panelist 2-3 minutes to introduce themselves, and then we'll launch into questions. I'll have some prepared and also take audience questions. Here are some of the questions that we used last time to get things moving:

• Why is governance important?
• How does your company govern SOA?
• What big mistake did you make early on that convinced you that you needed to govern your SOA efforts?
• What role do policies play in governing SOA? What policies do you have?
• How do you distinguish between design-time, deploy-time, and run-time policies? Do you treat them differently in the governance process?
• Do you have a center of excellence (COE)? What role does it play? How does it work?
• How are governance and architecture related?
• Have you encountered resistance to SOA governance in your organization? How do you overcome it?
• How do you enforce policies? Who enforces policy?
• What process do you use for feeding back information from enforcement and taking corrective action?
• Is any of your policy enforcement automated (WS-I checks for example)? How do you do it?
• What role do registries play in your governance efforts?
• What role do Web services management systems play in your governance efforts?
• Do you use SLAs or other contract devices between providers and consumers? How are they managed?

The audience responded very well last time and asked quite a few questions themselves. If you've got other questions about SOA governance that you think ought to be addressed, please leave a comment.