Many organizations are wrestling with the ways of governance for their service oriented architecture. SOA projects risk running seriously awry without getting a handle on their purpose and direction for the business.

Of course, since SOA and Enterprise 2.0 overlap so closely, this begs the question: should this governance be extended to Enterprise 2.0 activities?  For example, mashups are essentially the same as the composite applications that have formed the core of SOA projects for years now.

This was the question I recently put to a panel at ebizQ’s recent SOA Governance panel. I had the opportunity to moderate a stellar line-up of industry experts: Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director with Burton Group, and former Chief Technology Officer at Systinet; Ron Schmelzer, managing partner with ZapThink; Frank Martinez, senior vice president, product strategy for SOA Software; David Bressler, SOA Evangelist for the Actional products at Progress Software; Ed Horst, vice president of marketing and product strategy for AmberPoint; and John Michelson, a founder and chief scientist of iTKO LISA. (Archived audio replay available here.)

I posed the question: A lot of people engaged in rapid application development, or service development via mashups and other Web 2.0 methods. There’s a lot of potential for chaos. Should the emerging governance structures we see for SOA be extended to Web 2.0?  Should we go to the Web 2.0 folks and say, ‘Hi, I’m from the governance committee, and I’m here to help’?  Or will this kill Web 2.0 initiatives? Or, perhaps, Web 2.0ers will simply find a workaround the rules and policies?

Anne Thomas Manes says a lot of REST advocates she speaks with feel that governance isn’t required for REST-based services. “At which point I respond saying, are you kidding? Think about how many people have created really, really bad POX applications that they claim to be rest and actually have almost no representation of the REST principles involved. They don’t follow any of the constraints, and they’re basically just tunneling RPCs to URLs.”

Ron Schmelzer added that “we’re moving towards an environment where computing is being highly decentralized, where we’re not relying IT to be a sole providers of capabilities, but rather were relying more on the audience to create the value of that content.” But governance is paramount at the service provider level, he continued. “Organizations like Google and Amazon and YouTube simply can’t manage that environment where they have millions of people…making millions of contributions on a daily basis, without having some sort of environment where they can have control at the design at the change time and the runtime stage.”

Google Maps is a classic example, he continued. “There are thousands of applications now that are dependent on Google Maps API…  Google cant version that interface. They can’t just decide to up and change the way that the function works. If they do, they could be breaking some highly critical application that’s dependent on it.”

Such services require governance — “there’s really no choice,” Ron said. “It’s a matter of how they enable… Web 2.0 to continue to grow and provide value without making it brittle.”

Consumers of services also have issues, particularly in terms of keeping up with versioning. David Bressler pointed to soem of the issues that may arise when a service provider changes its apps. “When Google changes, if I’m the consumer, I want to make sure I’m not impacted,” he said. “As an enterprise, if I have a dozen different applications that are using my salesforce interface linking to Salesforce.com, I don’t want to have to manage a dozen different teams at the same team.”

Thus, governance takes on importance both on the producer and provider sides of Enterprise 2.0 services. (Archived audio replay of the panel discussion available here.)