SOA Technical Architecture Governance - Evaluating Maturity of Standards

Technical standards, when they are successful, provide portability and interoperability between products, create 3(rd) party markets, enhance competition, lower price and simplify integration. On the other hand, when a standard is adopted that fails, or ju=st fails to catch on, the cost and time for the inevitable reengineering can be devastating for the adopters and cause overall confusion and concern in the marketplace. While this is a problem for all of IT, SOA standards present unique challenges due to their rate of change and the industry-wide drive toward SOA. This paper will present a Standards Maturity Model (SMM) to serve as a guide for evaluating standards, assessing risk, and making plans for adoption. This model embraces the concept that a standard cannot be judged independent of the products supporting it, and the organization that publishes it.