The National IT and Telecom Agency (IT- og telestyrelsen) is working on common SOA-principles for the public sector. The draft can be downloaded here The agency has formulated 11 SOA-principles in six categories:

- Business supporting
- Documented and communicated
- Flexible
- Based on open standards and contracts
- Managed
- Secure

The background of the initiative is that many in the public sector feel SOA as intangible and it is difficult to get started. One of the solutions on these problems is common SOA-principles for the public sector. The aim is to make a publication after submitting to the OIO-Architecture committee and eventually public hearing. In this context the Agency held a workshop, which I participated in. The purpose of the workshop was to discus business goals and principles of SOA. It was a very interesting workshop with architects from public and private organizations, much good discussion and group work. The outcome of the SOA goals was that it of course depends on the perspective and that goals have different abstraction levels. The generic goal of SOA in e-government was concluded to be efficiency, better service, agility and increased competition among vendors, especially on large tight coupled systems.

The outcome of the discussion of the principles was that the principles were very good, but there were not any principles regarding governance and EA. More over is security a universally concern and challenge in all architectures and must maybe expelled from the principles.

This work is also interesting regarding my thesis. The principles are almost the same as the SOA- characteristics I have analyzed.