10.7 Governance Service Scope and Description

The initial wiki page is Version 0.0.1, October 27, 2010, the initial draft for a separate service.

This document includes the following:

Introduction

The Governance Service includes:

• Predefined templates, workflows, and policies for governing the service lifecycle
• An approval and review process for service specifications
• The ability to promote services through the stages of the service lifecycle

In addition to services, governance includes lifecycle management of artifacts, including all types of content and information models. Examples include the Enterprise Conformance and Compliance Framework (ECCF) specifications.

The Governance Service and workflows functional profiles are derived from the Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) Governance Model and the SOA Service Description Model.

Service-oriented Architecture is an architectural paradigm for organizing and using distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains. Consequently, it is important that organizations planning to engage in service interactions adopt governance policies and procedures sufficient to ensure standardization across both internal and external organizational boundaries. This standardization promotes the effective creation and use of SOA-based services.

The scope of the Governance Service includes governance of all artifacts and the ECCF service specifications. The Governance Service provides CBIIT with a mechanism to:

• Track and manage all the service specifications and supporting artifacts
• Set consistent policies that can be applied all the projects

The Governance Service also also allows external adopters to track their artifacts and specifications through an internal review process.

The Governance Service provides the following benefits:

• Improves productivity of the governance team and the internal CBIIT curation team
• Reduces communication overhead
• Promotes reuse and eliminates redundancy by providing a mechanism to identify services and artifacts and avoid silo-ed development.
• Addresses the key concern of the community, namely the ability to track information models through internal reviews
• Provides a mechanism to establish policies and consistently apply these policies across all service specifications
• Generates reports and metrics to track concerns such as compliance and issues

Stakeholders

Business Area

This service supports the Semantic Infrastructure, and will be used by the NCI governance team and external stakeholders to govern all specifications and supporting artifacts.

Service Description

The Governance Service will provide the following functionality:

• Provide compliance metrics as they relate to governance: mechanisms to catalog and enable discovery of compliance records associated with policies, contracts, and constraints that are based on these metrics.
• Provide a mechanism to inform participants of significant management events, such as changes in governance rules or regulations.
• Create policy templates: governance is expressed through policies and assumes use of focused policy modules that can be employed across many common circumstances.
• Create and edit service, artifact and specification rules and regulations.
• Define metrics: governance relies on metrics to define and measure compliance
• Create workflow templates and apply them to artifacts and services.
• Customize review and approval workflows.
• Provide the ability to create a custom service and artifact lifecycle and establish review milestones.
• Establish access control policies.
• Establish design time constraint policies against specific milestones in the artifact and service lifecycle.
• Establish runtime constraint policies against specific milestones in the artifact and service lifecycle.
• Enforce policies against service specifications and artifacts.
• Check service specifications and artifacts for compliance against established access control, design time constraints and runtime constraints.
• Support both human and automated approval and review and of all artifacts and services.
• Link users' security and access rights to particular governance and workflow.
• Support partial specifications and a governance framework that addresses the low end of the value curve, the innovators.
• Provide a path for moving up the value curve and governance of more robust specifications.
• Initiate service specification governance.
• Monitor the workflow and approval process.
• Allow governance team to set the status of a specification and promote it.
• Manage versioning and localization of the service specifications.
• Allow curators to set the status of a model and receive change notifications.
• Govern collaborative development.

Service Scope

The scope of the Governance Service is limited to providing the ability to create and manage workflows and policies as they relate to services and artifact governance. In supporting these core capabilities, the service will provide many interfaces to create, update, query and delete this information.

Service Interactions

The Governance Service will interact with the following systems and services:

• Knowledge Management Service: This service is the primary interface for managing all service specifications and artifacts. The Knowledge Management Service is a core semantic infrastructure service. The Governance Service uses this service to query for key metadata about the artifacts; this information is then used to define policies.
• Decision Support Service: This service provides a mechanism to construct semantic queries that can then be executed against the underlying artifacts. The Decision Support Service also provides interfaces for functions such as generating reports. The Governance Services will use these interfaces.

Assumptions and Risks

None

Governance Service Terminology