Integration Media

• What is the integration media? Do we really need a sophisticated ESB? Can we make do with simple Open Source middleware or can we use simple homegrown middleware? These are some of the questions that help in identifying the level of sophistication required in the integration media.
• What is the level of security to be supported?

Maturity of an Organization versus SOA
The maturity of an organization is usually measured in its performance against a specific set of goals. These goals are business drivers that help in defining the scope of the organizational focus, which is always on meeting business goals and includes, among the other things, increasing profits and reducing risks.

So, to comply with the maturity models existing in the industry, it's necessary for an organization to meet some or all of the SOA principles in such a way as to maximize its applicability to the business.

As we can see in Figure 2, the SOA solution consists of multiple components - an infrastructure layer, a set of applications, a set of business processes, and best practices. Though expertise in SOA architecture is the foundation of the overall solution, the other components, namely the business process expertise and applications expertise, are absolutely required to arrive at an end-to-end solution to the problem at hand.

As we can see, the maturity of an organization is reflected in the effectiveness with which it meets its goals, and so increases its profits and reduces its risks. Maturity can't be inferred by activity per se, but it can be inferred in the way an activity is done. However, it's necessary to keep in mind that the set of activities needed to meet business goals are always specific to the organization and specific to every enterprise. Once an organization has stated its goals, plans, and activities, maturity is the measure of how well these activities are done.

In this context, we have to keep in mind that every business has to align its business goals with its IT capabilities. Even a small teashop has to do business-IT alignment, and even a huge organization does the same business-IT alignment. However, a small organization can use manual processes (that may or may not be documented/standardized) and a huge corporation can use a lot of automated processes. To decide which company is more mature, it's necessary to weigh the execution of the business activities to meet the goals in the context of the size of the business. A good maturity study may conclude that a small company with a few employees is better aligned to SOA than a huge corporation with lots of employees.

One must also keep in mind that every huge corporation is the result of a sustained existence in business, improving on itself year after year. A big modern corporation was once a small company. Hence the rules for SOA maturity should be interpreted in the light of the size of the organization, the documented business goals or practices, and expected future plans.

Summary
In today's context, it's good to understand clearly what SOA can do and what it is. And it's more important to understand how much SOA is enough for a given organization. In other words, the optimum application of SOA can result in enormous savings and return for an organization. Beyond the optimum point, any SOA application would only bring limited results. We attempted to throw some light on some of the important factors to be considered in making this decision.