Is SOA governance even possible without data governance?

We talk a lot about SOA governance, and there has been no shortage of posts here at this blogsite about the importance of governance to make SOA work.

But is something being missed in the rush to SOA governance?  What about what's happening on the data side of the house? If data governance is inadequate -- information is outdated, out of sync, duplicated, or plain inaccurate -- SOA-enabled services and applications will be delivering garbarge. That's a formula for SOA disaster.

Informatica invited me to explore some of the issues between data and SOA governance at their integration blogsite, and I quote from Ed Tittel, a writer and consultant in data management, who said it best in a recent article at SearchSOA: That the linkage between SOA and data governance is vital. Tittel notes that in the rush to service-orient, many enterprises “omit issues related to data integration, management and governance in their designs.” This ultimately defeats the purpose of the SOA, as attempts to integrate systems across the enterprise hit the wall due to lack of a common data model.

To a large extent, effective SOA governance depends on effective data governance. The success of SOA depends on the underlying data model that is being accessed through services. Effective data governance helps ensure the quality of the data being delivered through SOA-enabled services.