The company says it believes SOA governance has been defined too narrowly as managing of services in a registry.

"What we want to first establish is SOA governance is a lot more about helping people define roles and responsibilities and decision rights and helping organizations establish policies and measurements," said Roger Oberg, vice president of marketing and strategy at IBM Rational. "These are the real challenging aspects of governance."

IBM's SOA governance definition fits, one analyst said.

"IBM has a good, broad, appropriate definition of SOA governance" said Randy Heffner, analyst at Forrester Research, in an e-mail. "Many of the specialist players want people to think that SOA governance is only about runtime enforcement of service request routing and access policies and such. Those are important, but the bigger impact is with the traditional IT governance issues of doing the right stuff and moving the organization towards a common direction."

As part of the IBM Business Consulting Services program, IBM is unveiling SOA Governance and Management Method, featuring a set of best practices for SOA. The program provides consulting to map requirements, policies and business plans for SOA.