SOA Maturity Assessment Exercise

The Oracle Level 5 SOA Maturity Model is designed to help organizations realize the extent of
their SOA capabilities, identify appropriate projects to undertake, and understand what benefits to
expect. Incorporated into the model are multiple capability dimensions of SOA (e.g. governance,
infrastructure, and organizations). Assessing the maturity of an organization requires evaluating
its capabilities in each of these dimensions. Oracle provides a cheatsheet to help with this task
that describes the attributes of each dimension at every level. To practice making SOA maturity
assessements, Oracle also provides sample case studies such as this one.

This case study exercise describes a fictitious company in need of an SOA assessment. Read
the case study, and using the Oracle Level 5 SOA Maturity Model cheatsheet assess the
company’s SOA capabilities. To find the Oracle Level 5 SOA Maturity Model cheatsheet, go to
www.oracle.com/soa and access the Oracle SOA Resource Center.

Guidelines
1. Assess the SOA maturity level of the company described in this case study. You should
refer to the Oracle Level 5 SOA Maturity Model cheatsheet to do this.
2. It’s a good idea to start at Level 1 for each dimension, review the criteria at that level and
work your way up.
3. Assign a level for each SOA capability dimension (Architecture, Infrastructure,
Organization, etc.) found in the Oracle Level 5 SOA Maturity Model. You may assign a
partial score (e.g. 2+) if you feel the company deserves partial credit for a particular level
of capability, e.g. you could assign 1+ for Architecture if you feel that company has some,
but not all the capabilities for Level 2 Architecture.
4. Note the minimum level of maturity you can assign for any capability dimension is 1.
5. The maturity level for each capabilitiy dimension is more important and relevant to the
organization than the overall, aggregate maturity level across all dimensions. The former
provides a more specific gap analysis of where an organization should focus to improve.
6. Note that similar to most organizations today, our case studies do not reflect companies
at extremely high levels of SOA maturity.
7. Consider what you would you do if you were an enterprise architect who is tasked with
helping this particular company.
Burn the Ship Marketing (BSM)

BSM is a leading marketing services agency in the US. Examples of offerings include airline and
hotel loyalty programs and event planning and execution. BSM still faces an increasingly
competitive marketplace with downward price pressure in which customers were refusing to pay
more for custom-built marketing services - they demanded vendors reuse intellectual property,
experience and existing solutions to build programs that would help them significantly lower costs
and reduce time to market.

BSM set about creating a new business model to compete more effectively, preserve margins
and grow the top line. With an aggressive goal of reducing the time and cost of delivering
solutions by more than 90 percent, it was evident that traditional cost cutting, e.g. outsourcing,
was inadequate. As a result, BSM had the vision to shift its business model from an agency
approach, in which it built individual custom solutions, to a process-manufacturing approach
where a core set of services could be easily configured and tailored for customers in various
industries. After BSM executives established the company’s bold objectives – to evolve its
business to a process-based service-manufacturing model – they turned to the CIO and IT to
make it happen. The CIO was a visionary and aspired to make things happen!

To meet their goals, business and IT started to develop and flesh out the vision for a service-
oriented business services network consisting of reusable, configurable solutions designed to
leverage BSM’s existing business relationships and bring together customers, suppliers and
partners to create an application and partner ecosystem. As many customer solutions within each
category are similar and could share common business services, BSM’s services based
approach was to reuse functions as services and re-purpose them as a solution set for clients in a
variety of markets. The Enterprise Architecture team assessed the business requirements and
quickly realized that SOA provided the architecture and technologies to address them. They
painted out a detailed enterprise SOA vision and strategy including reference SOA architecture,
suggested technology infrastructure and appropriate industry standards, training, design time and
runtime policy enforcement, etc. They had a great emphasis on the use of industry and vertical
standards to enable their applications to fit into and integrate with customers’ existing
environments. Given that they would utilize shared services for client solutions – they also
developed an operational model for services.

The business and architecture teams were big on vision, however, the IT teams were quite
nervous about delivering on this grand vision since they felt that they lacked the core set of skills
and methodologies to migrate to SOA. Moreover, given the grandness of the vision – setting up a
business services network – the IT team were very concerned about reliability, scalability,
security and performance. So, they focused on building out the infrastructure for this very
aggressive goal – they fleshed out their SOA infrastructure with middleware, Web services
orchestration, BPM, rules engines and data integration technologies. They built frameworks to
enable them to build applications to SOA (many of their developers were from client-server
backgrounds), and established key foundation services for identity management, rules
processing, service messaging, data, analytics, auditing, tracking and activation framework. They
even had the foresight to put in a web services management solution, not only to enable them to
manage security policies for services from a central location, but also to monitor usage of
services to enable cross-departmental and cross-customer billing. To help developers find
services, they also deployed a registry solution and documented service lifecycle governance
policies. BSM were always big on using information and analytics to make decisions. Their SOA
vision was no different – they set about designing core data services into their solutions reference
architecture. Analytics was one of their solutions’ biggest differentiators and they put together
plans to build analytics dashboards that combined real-time and historical data into their SOA
solutions going forward.

About 12 months later, the IT team still hadn’t implemented a single customer solution based on
the new architecture. The CEO binned the now costly SOA initiative.