WebServices dot org

Growing Pains: Moving from Point A to B, and on to S, O, and A

A few months back, three leading SOA companies — AmberPoint, Sonic Software and Systinet — put forth a growth model for SOA development. The ‘SOA Maturity Model’ is based on Carnegie-Mellon Software Engineering Institute's process improvement methodology called the 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.

All well and good, of course. But we here at Webservices.Org would like to propose our own roadmap of the phases of SOA, and what to expect when such levels are attained. Here’s our stab at the five steps to SOA Nirvana:

Level 1: Industry conferences, Webcasts, in-flight magazines – whatever they’re talking about, we’ve got to have it, too

In the beginning, 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 mockingly refer to most of these efforts as “Lunchroom Web services,” meaning they are running Web services to support peripheral applications that aren’t really 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!

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.

Of course, by the time many of us reach this stage, SOA will be seen as an archaic, “legacy” approach, and the hype curve will have moved onto the next big thing, such as Web 5.0 or the GagaNet. But isn’t the other thing that makes the world go round?