More SOA Metrics from the Blogosphere

I recently found another set of SOA metrics on IT-Director.com. There is a gratifying degree of overlap with the metrics that I discussed recently. I particularly like the categorization into different metrics for different roles in the organization.

From his observation of innovative organisations, Smith has come up with 10 possible service delivery metrics, grouped by organisational area:

Corporate Metrics:

1. Revenue per service;
2. Service vitality index (the amount of revenue from new services over the last 12 months as a proportion of total service revenue);

Management Metrics:

3. Number of new services generated and used as a percentage of total services;
4. Mean time to Service Development (MTTSD);
5. Mean time to Service Change (MTTSC);
6. Service Availability;

Project Metrics:

7. Service reuse;
8. Cost of not using or stopping a service;

Service Development Metrics:

9. Service complexity;
10. Service quality assurance based on systems-level tests that examine the behaviour of service-oriented use cases across possible choreographies.

The original post contains some further discussion of the metrics.

I suggest that Service Reuse also has a “management” role since that is related to return on assets which is a key measure of success for your SOA initiative.

Revenue per Service is another interesting one and I’m not clear if this refers to “external revenue” or “internal revenue”. There is an argument for measuring both.

External revenue reflects the value of services to supporting overall revenues to the business. I suspect it would be difficult for most organizations to attribute external revenues to the service level. Revenue would map to a particular business process which in turn is supported by services. There would then need to be some way to allocate a contribution to each service on this basis.

Internal revenue would reflect the value of the service to internal business operations and could be counted via some metric on how often a service was used.