IBM's new Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Governance will combine software and consulting services to provide best practices and processes that ensure an SOA provides corporate value, said Marie Chow, marketing director at IBM Rational. IBM hopes to help companies expand SOA governance efforts beyond registry technology, where Web services and the policies associated with their use can be catalogued, according to Chow.

'[Registries] don't deal with things like who owns what service and who is responsible for fixing a shared service when it breaks,' she said.

New tools include an SOA governance plug-in for IBM Rational Method Composer, where IBM has packaged governance best practices, and IBM Rational Data Architect, which is designed to help users adopt and enforce standards in their data models. IBM is also launching IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database, which automatically discovers and manages information about a user's IT environment, including IT resources, configuration items and user identities within an SOA, according to IBM.

IBM also now offers consulting services to help users map the requirements, policies and regulations related to an SOA.