SOA Quality Spectrum

We've covered a lot of ground over the last month since I first proposed my definition of SOA, and I wanted to take the opportunity to do a bit of a recap and tie it all together by comparing and contrasting the various flavours of SOA discussed to date.

As I've previously mentioned, there are good SOAs and bad SOAs - with some considerably worse than others. So what are the typical metrics we might use in assessing the quality of an SOA? One might say it depends on the needs of the business the SOA supports. That is, an SOA is of high quality if it clearly aligns with and supports the strategic goals of the business.

Obviously every business is different. Even businesses that compete in the same market and service the same customers have unique characteristics. They have different organisational structures and business processes. Their distinctiveness is what gives them their competitive advantage. It is what differentiates them from their competitors.

Business strategy is heavily influenced by the external forces that operate on a business. Porter's five forces analysis is a good way of identifying these external forces and deriving strategies for gaining competitive advantage.

Regardless of the business and the market in which it operates, an organisation must evolve and adapt as the competitive landscape changes. The ability of an organisation to invoke change quickly, inexpensively and at low risk is a key factor influencing its success. It facilitates innovation and affects how responsive an organisation is to market forces.

Although there are many factors that influence business agility unrelated to IT, a machine is only as fast as its slowest moving part - and in many large organisations, that part is IT. For these organisations, IT becomes the bottleneck, resulting in the perception that IT is a necessary evil, always at odds with the rest of the business.

So what aspect of an IT architecture determines agility? Simply put - coupling. Coupling determines the extent to which change within one software component affects another. With a high quality SOA, a single change to how a business chooses to implement a specific business capability is isolated to a single service. As only the implementation has been affected, the service contract remains unchanged and consequently no other service is affected or even need know about that change.

So although there are other quality metrics that vary from business to business and industry to industry, agility is a key universal quality metric for an IT architecture. Based on this metric alone, I propose the following SOA quality spectrum.


I've included JBOWS, Service Oriented Integration, Layered Service Models and Self-Contained Process-Centric Service Models on the spectrum. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has seen any other flavours of SOA out there that I've missed. I'm also interested in getting feedback from people who would propose alternative or additional quality metrics for SOA.