scope:

Overview

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that supports service orientation. A service is a business task with an externalized service description that often represents a contract between a provider and a consumer. As organizations adopt SOA and the use of services as the fundamental structuring element of their architecture, they increasingly encounter the need to assess where they are in their migration path and how best to achieve the expected benefit derived from integrating and investing in greater levels of SOA maturity.

OSIMM helps an organization to create a roadmap for its incremental transformation towards more mature levels of service integration, in order to achieve increasing business benefits associated with higher levels of maturity. OSIMM is used to determine which organizational characteristics are desirable in order to attain a new level of maturity. This will also help determine whether problems occurring at the current level of service integration maturity can be solved by evolving to a higher level.

OSIMM is offered to the industry as a standardized model to help organizations guide their SOA transformation journey. A standard maturity model enables enterprises to benchmark their SOA levels and develop roadmaps for transformation to assist their planning. It can also be used by vendors to position their services and software against these benchmarks. OSIMM may also serve as a framework for the transformation process that can be customized to suit the specific needs of organizations and assessments. This process consists of the following steps:

• Prepare the OSIMM assessment framework 

• Determine the initial level of maturity

• Determine the target level of maturity 

• Identify the transformation path necessary for the organization to achieve the desired level of maturity

OSIMM structures the assessment of the organization's current state in service integration and flexibility (including service orientation) and of its desired or future state for different lines of business or enterprise, taking into account pain-points in flexibility or integration that need to be improved. It provides a model for assisting the organization in determining its architectural strategy when adopting service orientation, including the creation of an architectural roadmap for initiatives in legacy transformation, integration with one or more packaged applications, application renovation and development, and systems integration. This roadmap helps to determine the scope, focus, and incremental steps for different parts of the organization in order to transform them towards a higher level of service orientation and service integration, with justifications in terms of anticipated business benefits. OSIMM provides a framework for surfacing insights and identifying IT improvements in terms of component development, service integration, SOA, and IT governance.

OSIMM focuses on increasing levels of flexibility in seven aspects of an organization or enterprise: business, organization and governance, methods and processes, application portfolio, architecture, information, infrastructure, and operational management. Focus on these aspects aids the adoption of a more flexible business by planning integration in advance and constructing business models, processes, applications, and infrastructure mindful of flexibility.

The OSIMM base model is specified by this document. The base model defines the OSIMM framework and the assessment process. The base model is designed to be extended by allowing customers and consulting organizations to add additional maturity indicators. By extending the model, the maturity assessment can be focused on the adoption of evolving industry frameworks, new techniques, or organizational imperatives. The authors of the OSIMM standard fully expect that a database of OSIMM extensions will evolve, providing greater insight into the process of SOA adoption.

OSIMM may be used to conduct assessments of the current and desired levels of maturity for an enterprise or line of business within an organization and design a plan of action to transform from the current to the desired levels. For example, an organization may wish to apply OSIMM to a particular set of applications in the organization's portfolio. A decision is made to partition the large number of applications into a small number of partitions, based upon affinity to business function. The current state of each partition is then assessed using the maturity model. Based upon the pain-points, business drivers, and goals, the target state for each partition is established. The transformation increment for each partition (which may be different for each partition) is then defined in order to achieve the target state for that partition.