The goal of Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) governance is to align the business with IT by providing a suitable decision framework. In this article, first published in the Cutter IT Journal (Vol. 20, No.6 June 2007), Senior Architect Hao He and Chief Technology Officer Brett McDowall propose alignment can, in part, be achieved by building a common model between the business and IT.

The authors argue that before describing business entities with a taxonomy, it is far more important to identify each of them with a unique identifier.  Absolutely anything important in an enterprise should be identified by a Universal Business Identifier (UBI) – using the convention specified by the highly successful Universal Resource Identifier we already use to specify Web addresses. Working with UBIs would meet a number of important SOA requirements, such as identification, addressing, ownership, resource lookup and transparency.

With more visibility, better default behaviour, less complexity, and more business-oriented computing solutions, both SOA and enterprise governance become much easier.

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