A few years back, a group of vendors put forth the first SOA Maturity Model, based
on Carnegie-Mellon Software Engineering Institute’s process improvement
methodology called Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI).
The SOA Maturity Model takes us from Level 1, “an initial
learning and initial project phase”; to Level 4, which deals
with moving processes to the business level, and ultimately to Level 5,
in which the SOA-based information systems becomes the
“enterprise nervous system”; for the business, and
can respond in an automated way to business events.

In response, I had put together another maturity model for SOA, not based on an engineering school’s framework, but on the reality of where things seem to fall within today’s organizations.

The five-step model I first proposed a couple of years back has stood the test of time through the ages, and is republished here. Here is the progression to SOA, in five easy steps:

Level 1: Industry conferences, Webcasts, in-flight magazines – whatever they’re talking about, we’ve got to have it, too: In this first stage, upper-level managers read and hear about Web
services and SOA and say, “Hey, we need one of
those!”; They appoint someone, usually an IT person, to check
out the worthiness of the technology. Of course, what they
don’t know is that folks deep in the trenches have been
creating Web services for years now. In many cases, the services are
being deployed and managed on a piecemeal basis by enlightened
individuals or departments that are attempting to do end-runs around
legacy systems and calcified management structures. Which means the
organization has already made it to the second level.

Level 2: JBOWS (Just a Bunch of Web Services): This is the level most organizations are at, with plenty of Web
services deployed in different places around the enterprise. Some
analysts refer to most of these efforts as “Lunchroom Web services,” meaning they are running
Web services to support peripheral applications that aren’t
critical to the business. (Then again, as they say, an army
travels on its stomach, but that’s another issue.) Such
efforts do provide some valuable training and insights into the nuances
of Web services development. Typically, these may be countless
point-to-point services that have been created and deployed by various
departments. Typically, the individual deployers are not aware of what
other services exist across their enterprises.

Level 3: GBOWS (Governed Bunch of Web Services): That means that some managers, maybe within the CIO’s
office, finally recognize that they need to build and roll out a
coordinated and tested set of services that others in the enterprise
can share on as as-needed basis. This requires orchestration, a central
registry/repository, process-based testing, and related management
tools. Ultimately, this repository may start out fairly skimpy, with
adoption of the services purely voluntary on the part of end-user
departments or business units. The key thing is that they’re
there when they’re needed; which takes us to the
next level.

Level 4: SOA Lite: At this stage, business end users, with the help of IT professionals
and architects, are aware of the capabilities offered through their
organization’s service-oriented architecture, and begin
assembling such services for at some selected end-to-end business
processes. These services exist on a standalone basis, and do not
require any tweaking to be able to interoperate with other services
within the repository. In addition, these services are
“hot-swappable”; meaning they can be
upgraded or changed without disrupting the process they support. Plus,
these services are used and reused by two or more departments across
the enterprise.

Level 5: SOA Nirvana (Or getting close to it..): You know you have reached SOA Nirvana when you can decompose an
entire, end-to-end business process and reassemble it to fit a new
requirement. And, the ultimate test of SOA purity is whether you could,
in theory, completely decompose your entire business and rebuild it
with service components.

By the way, the time is drawing near… Be sure to catch ebizQ’s upcoming conference, SOA in Action, an informative two-day
event (October 28-29), featuring leading experts and practitioners (not
to mention yours truly!) discuss strategies and best practices for
promoting and deploying SOA throughout the enterprise. Join us for an
agenda packed full of sessions and panel discussions on the latest
thinking in SOA!