The seven stages of SOA maturity, as described in The SOA Source Book, by Dr. Chris Harding (of The Open Group):
1 - Silo: "Individual parts of the organization are developing their own software independently, with no integration of data, processes, standards, or technologies."
2 - Integrated: "Technologies have been put in place to communicate between the silos, and to integrate the data and interconnections. The construction of an IT system that integrates across different parts of the organization becomes possible. However, integration does not extend to common standards in data or business processes. Therefore, connecting two systems requires a possibly complex conversion of the data, operations, and protocols that they use."
3 - Componentized: "The IT systems in the silos have been analyzed and broken down into component parts, with a framework in which they can be developed into new configurations and systems. There may also be some limited analysis of the business functionality into components. Although components interact through defined interfaces, they are not loosely-coupled, which limits interoperability between systems in different parts of the organization, or different organizations within the business eco-system."
4 - Services: "Composite applications can now be built from loosely-coupled business services. The way that services may be invoked is based upon open standards and independent of the underlying application technology. The services have an IT infrastructure that supports them with suitable protocols... However, at this stage the composition of services is still performed by developers writing bespoke code, thus limiting the agility of the development of new business processes."
5 - Composite Services: "It is now possible to construct a business process for a set of interacting services, not just by bespoke development, but by the use of a composition language to define the flow of information and control through the individual services. This permits the assembly of business services into composite business processes."
6 - Virtualized Services: "The business and IT services are now provided through a level of indirection. The service consumer does not invoke the service directly, but through a virtual service. The infrastructure performs the work of converting the virtual service invocation into an invocation of the real service...." The virtual service thereby becomes more loosely-coupled from the infrastructure on which it is running, permitting more opportunities for the composition of business services."
7 - Dynamically Re-Configurable Services: "Prior to this level, the business process assembly, although agile, is performed at design time by developers (under the guidance of business analysis and product managers) using suitable tooling. Now this assembly may be performed at runtime, either assisted by the business analysts via suitable tooling, or by the system itself. This requires the ability to access a repository of services and to query this repository via the characteristics of the required services. In its simplest form, these characteristics may have been defined in advance, restricting the system to selecting and locating specific instances of services."
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