Service Scope and Description
Governance Service
Version 0.0.1
10/27/2010

Table of Contents
1 Introduction
2 Stakeholders
3 Business Area
4 Service Description
5 Service Scope
6 Service Interactions
7 Assumptions and Risks
8 Glossary

Introduction

This includes predefined templates, workflows, and governance policies for governing the service lifecycle as well as an approval and review process for service specifications and the ability to promote services through the stages of the service lifecycle. In addition to services, governance includes lifecycle management of artifacts. Artifacts include all kinds of content and information models, examples include the ECCF specifications.
The Service Governance and workflows category contains functional profiles 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 utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains. Consequently, it is important that organizations that plan to engage in service interactions adopt governance policies and procedures sufficient to ensure that there is standardization across both internal and external organizational boundaries to promote 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 and it also allows external adopters to track their artifacts/specifications as they go through an internal review process. Specifically it helps:

• Improves productivity of the governance team and the internal CBIIT curation team and cuts down on the communication overhead.
• Promotes reuse and eliminates redundancy by providing a mechanism to identify services/artifacts and avoid silo-ed development.
• Addresses the key concern of the community, which is the ability to track their information models as they go through internal reviews.
• Provides a mechanism to establish policies and consistently apply across all service specifications
• Generate reports/metrics to track the compliance, issues, etc

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.
• 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 multiple use of focused policy modules that can be employed across many common circumstances
• Create and edit service/artifact/specification rules and regulations.
• Define metrics - Governance relies on metrics to define and measure compliance
• Create workflow templates and apply to artifacts and services. Customize review and approval workflows
• Ability to create a custom service/artifact lifecycle and establish review milestones
• Establish Access Control Policies
• Establish Design Time Constraint Policies – Against specific milestones in artifact/service lifecycle
• Establish Runtime Constraint Policies – Against specific milestones in artifact/service lifecycle
• Enforce policies against service specifications and artifacts
• Check service specifications/artifacts for compliance against established access control, design time constraints and runtime constraints
• Support for both human and automated approval and review and of all artifacts and services.
• Link the users security and access rights to particular governance and workflow
• Support for 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

• 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/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:

1. Knowledge Management Service: This service is the primary interface for managing all service specifications and artifacts, the knowledge management 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.
2. Decision Support Service: The decision support service provides a mechanism to construct semantic queries that can then be executed against the underlying artifacts; it also provides interfaces for generating reports, etc. The governance services will use these interfaces.

Assumptions and Risks

None

Glossary