Earlier this year, ZapThink’s Ron Schmelzer debunked the whole idea of SOA maturity models in an essay, “Forget Maturity Models — It’s Time for an Agility Model.”

“It’s becoming clear that the industry doesn’t really need a SOA maturity model. The act of doing SOA properly in itself is an act of architectural maturity that many companies are having trouble grasping. Companies are trying to understand how to best apply SOA and realize the benefits against their own stated business goals. As such, what’s not needed is an abstract, enterprise-wide, industry-wide, artificial measure of maturity that complies with CMMI’s five levels, but rather a way of measuring the state of a SOA implementation against the fundamental goal of SOA itself: agility.”

Measuring agility on a scale of 1 to 5 (as almost all maturity models do), is a pointless exercise. Simply put, not all service-oriented projects need to have the same level of agility as others. Some projects require deep levels of loose coupling. Other projects might not need the same amount of loose coupling since each layer of coupling adds flexibility at the potential cost of complexity and efficiency.”

Schmelzer goes on to make a persuasive argument that proposes a broader metric, based on his earlier Seven Levels of Loose Coupling, that could be used to measure the appropriate agility of a specific project or initiative.

Whether or not you agree with Schmelzer, and his main point that “not all service-oriented projects need to have the same level of agility as others,” much of his criticism of SOA Maturity Models can be directly applied to Cloud Maturity Models, especially if your focus is on software as a service or even capacity as an automated, self-administered service, which is what many organizations seems to be looking for in their current cloud experiments.

Read more at: InformationWeek