Governance (service governance, design time governance, run time governance) is not going away. There are some who are under the impression that as the tools become more sophisticated and become integrated into the environments, and as SOA progresses into a realistically deployable cloud computing model, that governance becomes part of the background operation.Todd Biske makes a very convincing argument otherwise...
The ...problem with (this, that governance is going away) statement is the notion that design-time governance is only concerned with service design and development. That’s simply not true. (There are) three timeframes of governance: pre-project, project, and run-time. There’s a lot more that goes on before run-time than design, and these activities still need to be governed. It is true that if you’re leveraging an external provider, you don’t have any need to govern the development practices...
Todd has a lot more to say on the matter worth reading. But the point is, even software as a service and/or cloud computing doesn't change the need for governance. In some ways it increases it!
[Why? Because as components of the business process become more functionally distributed, and with cloud computing or software as a service the distribution including even the physical location of the components' operation, tracking, controling, and monitoring all of those points included in each process becomes critical to the successful operation of the process.]