IPOs need even more scrutiny about corporate governance than established public companies. These private companies are often reluctant to put aside the privileges of being private in order to become a public firm. In the long run, the best IPOs have a shareholder-friendly corporate IT governance structure. That is why corporate governance is one of the four factors that go into Renaissance Capital's rating system. In the context of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), governance is an often-misunderstood term. Some people use the term SOA Governance to mean service lifecycle governance—that is, governing the lifecycle of services from creation through deployment. Others take it to mean applying runtime policies to services. But is there more to SOA governance than this? And, without a common understanding of what governance means, are organizations that adopt SOA simply setting themselves up for failure? I believe, that governance with SOA should ultimately be about delivering on ...