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Wednesday 26th October 2005
COMMENTARY - HOW MATURE IS YOUR MATURITY MODEL?
| REFERENCES: CBDI developed the SOA Maturity Model in 2003 as part of the CBDI SOA Roadmap work. This work has been effective is helping many organizations understand and plan their SOA strategy in a manner that is entirely vendor and technology independent. Much of this material is in the public domain at:
CBDI Roadmap Site, including wide range of reports on Roadmap Planning including the CBDI Maturity Model. Reports are in public domain
CMMI Overview Presentation
| An interesting question posed by two correspondents this week – how do the CMMI capability levels relate to SOA? Is there a connection? We have discussed this question on a number of occasions with customers that have adopted CMMI.
CMMI is a capability maturity model which provides “a reference model of mature practices in a specified discipline” in a generalized manner that can be applied to different disciplines. SOA is an overlay to current disciplines and introduces a delta that spans all disciplines involved in solution delivery.
CMMI users will certainly want to map the SOA implications to the CMMI reference model in some detail in order to ensure that the general maturity achieved to date is not compromised by the introduction of SOA.
MAPPING CMMI TO THE SOA MATURITY MODEL
A good place to start is with the CMMI Maturity Levels, and to map these to the CBDI SOA Maturity Model.
Level 1 INITIAL: Process unpredictable, poorly controlled and reactive.
Maps directly to SOA Early Learning
Level 2 MANAGED: Process characterized for projects, and is often reactive.
Here the CMMI and SOA part company. While it may be relevant in some organizations to create an SOA for a project, we would characterize that as Early Learning.
Level 3 DEFINED.: Process characterized for the organization and is proactive.
This level maps directly to the SOA Integration stage – where the objective is to deliver standard services for core business capabilities that can create consistent data and rules across defined parts of the enterprise or ecosystem.
Level 4 QUANTITATIVELY MANAGED.: Process measured and controlled. This level also maps to the SOA Integration stage. In an SOA measurement and management are essential to ensure the SOA is effective. You can’t wait until the core business services are up and running to implement measurement.
Level 5: OPTIMIZING. Focus on continuous improvement. Maps directly to the Reengineering stage and probably to the Maturity stage also. In SOA there is an observable step function once the enterprise has established core services, that enables collaborative working that stimulates process improvement at all levels.
ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY
Clearly there is not a direct match between the levels - does that matter? We suggest not at all – CMMI is a generalized reference model and SOA has particular emphasis, particularly on intra and inter organizational collaboration. There is distinct de-emphasis on project activity and prioritization of enterprise and ecosystem focus.
I have noted previously that CMMI separate out measurement from definition, and wondered whether this makes sense, because it seems so obvious that when you have defined the process, it’s pretty essential to measure it. However I rationalize this because the CMMI is a measurement system, and it makes sense to call out process definition and measurement separately because in the real world this is often an area which is overlooked.
We ourselves have been doing work on SOA metrics and believe that proactive measurement of architectural decisions is really important, because you can’t wait until solutions are delivered to find out whether you have really improved business flexibility!
The other reason that we don’t have an exact mapping between CMMI Maturity levels and the SOA Maturity Model is that the SOA stages were developed as an axis for practical roadmap planning. So the levels are useful in context with mapping important SOA states to a vast range of SOA activities that are identified by Stream (subject areas).
So final thoughts are that CMMI users should find this mapping easy enough and the twin perspective should be very effective in ensuring that SOA adoption activity supports and develops CMMI capabilities. |
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