"Our processes are bulletproof. Nothing gets into production that doesn't go through the proper and complete approval process." Famous last words uttered by far too many enterprise architects. Some of them actually believe it's true - others think that by hoping it's true, maybe, just maybe, they can make it true.
The reality, as any line-of-business developer can attest, is much less clear-cut. The challenge is that governance only gets harder the more an organization moves towards a service-based architecture.
One of the first myths that drives a number of enterprise architecture governance decisions is that adding more rules reduces risk. That may be true in theory, but in practice it actually increases risk. The reason is simple: complexity increases risk. A perfect case study of this, one that most people have probably experienced, is password-control policies. As many IT organizations have attempted to "improve security," they've done things like disallow use of dictionary words in passwords, force passwords to change often, disallow reuse of older passwords, etc. The net result is that, because of the added complexity, more people write down their password on a Post-it note. And written-down passwords increase the likelihood of a security breach while, at the same time, making it harder to detect the breach. Increased complexity increases risk.
