The first dimension of the model deals with technology infrastructure.  There are specialized products that can have benefits to organizations adopting SOA, however, the focus in this dimension is not on what technologies have been purchased, but rather on how the technologies are being utilized. 

The technology infrastructure domain is split into two major domains: run-time execution infrastructure and governance/management infrastructure.  Organizations must first provide appropriate execution infrastructure for services, and then governance and management solutions for those services and associated infrastructure.  Advanced levels of maturity deal with the integration of these two domains in a closed-loop system.  Here are the descriptions of each level of maturity within the technology infrastructure domain.

Level 0: Ad Hoc

No specific technologies are associated with SOA or Services.  This doesn’t prevent services from being deployed in your enterprise, only that it is completely haphazard.  Every project may deploy them differently, use different technologies to build them, etc.

Level 1: Common Goals

A strategic view of the technology infrastructure has been established, vendors have been invited to present their vision for SOA, and technology evaluations are planned or underway.  Once again, the organization may still have service deployed, but with little to no consistency in the technologies involved and how they are deployed.

Level 2: Foundation

At this level, vendor solutions for service development and execution have been acquired and in use.  At this point, all new services that are under development are targeted for an appropriate technology platform (based upon the goals established at Level 1) with a consistent approach to deployment.  If the organization previously leveraged EJBs, CORBA, DCOM/COM+, or other distributed programming strategies, they should understand how these would be leveraged versus Web Services, REST, etc.

Level 3: Method and Governance

At this level, the organization should have SOA Management and Governance solutions in place and in use.   At a minimum, this should include the ability to collect and report metrics on service invocations, the ability to monitor the service environment and issue appropriate alerts, and the ability to discover potential services for utilization in a solution from a registry / repository.  The key to this, however, is that these technologies must be in use by the enterprise.  Merely developing or purchasing and installation these systems does not constitute maturity, rather, it is the active use of these systems in a consistent manner across the enterprise.

Level 4: Service-Oriented Enterprise

The Service-Oriented Enterprise level constitutes a state where the associated technologies execute in harmony.  Rather than seen separate infrastructure components, the run time execution, run time management, and design time management all execute seamlessly.  At a minimum, an organization that has reached this level should have integration between their service management technologies, their service execution technologies, and their service metadata (registry/repository) technologies.  Many organizations may not reach this level or even require this level of integration.  The organization may be exploring the use of system events for automated provisioning (adaptive infrastructure), however, this is not required.  An additional litmus test for this level is whether SOA management is still viewed as a niche activity from Enterprise Systems Management, or whether it is simply the way that systems are now managed. 

Level 5: Optimized

At this level, the organization is optimizing the use of their technology infrastructure through the use of automated feedback loops from the infrastructure itself.  This could entail automated provisioning of systems, predictive provisioning of systems based upon business intelligence analysis, customized policy management, or anything deemed to be above the norm of the typical Service-Oriented Enterprise.