3. SOA, Maturity Models, SOA MM and Relevant Work

SOA, based on the loosely coupled principle of systems architecture, can address the complexity, inflexibility, and brittleness issues of existing approaches to integration through reusable services that can be easily and flexibly “orchestrated” into different business processes to meet new or existing business system requirements. Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute proposed the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) which became the prototype based on which all other maturity models evolved. CMM helps toward evaluating the capabilities and “maturity” of an organization in regards to its software development processes. The Model has then been varied and extended to be applied to IT Infrastructure Management, Enterprise Architecture Management, Knowledge Management, etc. CMMI (CMM, Integration-specific) is one such a maturity model which was evolved from the CMM. CMMI helps integrate traditionally separate organizational functions, set process improvement goals and priorities, provide guidance for quality processes and a point of reference for appraising current processes. Based on that all other SOA MM were emerged.