SOA governance is ultimately about control--laying down the law on process and policy, then enforcing it within your organization to ensure IT delivers quality applications and services that meet business needs. Implemented correctly, SOA governance products can facilitate and automate that enforcement, while ensuring adherence to an architectural standard for your SOA initiative, allowing the reuse of services across projects using metadata management, and decreasing the number of defects in deployed services by enforcing testing and documentation policies.
All worthy goals, but "experts" and vendors are tossing the term governance around like crooked Olympics judges hand out perfect 10s. We don't blame you if you're tired of hearing the word. It's overused, overhyped, and under-explained. In many ways, this is to be expected: Governance is about process and policy, which are specific to each organization. But there are some constants.
