Last month, Aberdeen Group released a report detailing the findings from analyzing the service orientation results over a period of eighteen months for approximately 400 companies. The analysis revealed a ‘deep division’ between enterprises that simply deploy ‘a bunch of Web services’ and those that take a more strategic and comprehensive approach to service orientation. A lot of great analysis of these findings has emerged within the blogosphere:

• Survey: Done right, SOA pays by Joe McKendrick
• SOA Beginning to Pay Off by David Linthicum
• Survey points to SOA pay off by Tom Jowitt

I’ll let you dig through the report as well as the above posts for more details, but I would like to highlight one interesting aspect of the report. Aberdeen identifies three classifications of SOA maturity that categorize the survey respondents:

1. Best-in-Class (top 20% of aggregate performance scorers) - Characterized by organizations that prioritize investments in education/training, architecture, SOA middleware and infrastructure, and processes aimed at measuring and tweaking performance
2. Average (middle 50% of aggregate performance scorers) - Characterized by organizations that have made minor investments in SOA middleware and infrastructure, very little in education/training, and have virtually ignored organizational performance measurement metrics for refining the enterprise
3. Laggards (bottom 30% of aggregate performance scorers) - Characterized by organizations that have made little to no investment in SOA tools or training/education, tend to deploy Just a Bunch of Web Services (JBOWS), and virtually ignore the importance of governance

Beyond just identifying and labeling these groups, the report provides some compelling metrics around how these three categories drastically impact the ROI realized from service orientation. For example, every one of the Best-in-class organizations saw a reduction in application development costs, compared with only 59% of Average organizations. Those companies identified as Laggards, however, actually saw an increase in application development costs. Similar trends were identified regarding maintenance costs and impacts to user satisfaction.

So the question remains – Are you a SOA Laggard?