Stories About SOA - How Mature Are We, and who can tell anyway?
Depending on which media you are reading about service oriented architecture, service orientation or service oriented concepts you often will realize that it's often only about the technical aspects of this paradigm.
In essence it is often stated that if you create web services to expose functionality and you stick to the standards that are established around web services you're done.
However the truth is that if you do just only that you will end up winning only little or nothing as you're business to IT alignment is as poor as before and your ability to respond to changes in your company's business didn't improve much. Therefore it is indicated to understand the broader sense of SOA and spend some thoughts about things like business capabilities and how they do map to technically implemented services or about needs and requirements to manage and monitor an existing service infrastructure not only to ensure technical health but also to enable usage based billing of servicesjust as an example. Another topic to take into account is how to establish means that enable good and flexible governance and to apply governance changes fast and in an efficient way.
Sounds complex? It is complex be sure about that! And in order to create an action plan and to define a roadmap on how to evolve to a really powerful SOA you first of all need to realize where you are at the moment regarding all those issues. You need a maturity model that allows you to describe where you are in the process and what needs to be formally achieved in order to further mature your service oriented assets. But here begins already the hard part as there is no maturity model in place that covers all of the areas mentioned above. There are some approaches but non has set the level for being widely adopted nor being really sufficient. One of the more complete ones is the Enterprise Service Orientation Maturity Model (ESOMM) created by Microsoft. While still not as comprehensive as required it is suitable to begin analyzing your status.
I wrote a short paper about it explainig the ESOMM layers and capabilities. If you are interested in the paper just drop me a note however please be aware that it is German language only at the moment. However for some additional information you can visit the link below.