Approaches Regarding Business Logic Modeling in Service Oriented Architecture

As part of the Service Oriented Computing (SOC), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a technology that has been developing for almost a decade and during this time there have been published many studies, papers and surveys that are referring to the advantages of projects using it. In this article we discuss some ways of using SOA in the business environment, as a result of the need to reengineer the internal business processes with the scope of moving forward towards providing and using standardized services and achieving enterprise interoperability.Business Rules, Business Processes, SOA, BPM, BRM, Semantic Web, Semantic Interoperability

Extensible Architectures: The Strategic Value of Service Oriented Architecture in Banking

Information and communication technology (ICT) has helped to drive increasingly intense global competition. In turn, this intensity increases the need for flexibility and rapid changeability in ICT to support strategies that depend on organizational agility. We report a comparative, cross-cultural case study of the implementation of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) at a Scandinavian bank and a Swiss bank. The strategic rewards in the adoption of SOA appear to go beyond marketplace issues of ICT capability acquisition, and unexpectedly arise in the creation of an extensible organizational ICT architecture. The extensibility of the ICT architecture that results from the adoption of SOA provides potential for greater organizational agility (and thereby competitiveness)

Factors influencing the alignment of SOA development with business objectives

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has gained focus as a driver for bridging and aligning business and IT-oriented views in information system development. The critical aspect of successful SOA is aligning technology and business; without proper alignment, the full potential of SOA will not be achieved. The current academic literature includes only few empirical studies on business-IT alignment aspects related to SOA adoption. In this exploratory study we explore factors influencing successful SOA implementation. We interview IT and business people from nine organisations appearing as SOA forerunners in Finland. Our findings indicate that successful SOA adoption is affected by several factors varying from organisation culture to processes and methods, communication and technology. The findings form a basis for future SOA research and a set of guidelines for practitioners

Investigating the Role of Enterprise Architecture in Big Data Analytics Implementation: A Case Study in a Large Public Sector Organization

Big Data Analytics (BDA) offers capabilities that can support a wide range of business areas across an organization. Organizations are increasingly turning to Enterprise Architecture (EA) to manage BDA implementation complexities. Through a case study in a large public sector organization, how EA supports various stages of BDA implementation is examined. The findings show that EA can address BDA challenges through 18 specific roles, which are categorised into four domains: Strategy (6 roles), Technology (4 roles), Collaboration (3 roles) and Governance (5 roles). While EA appears to have the most prominent role in strategy planning process, our study also identifies factors that can lead to the ineffectiveness of EA roles, such as frequent changes in business strategy. This study offers important implications to research and practice in EA and BDA implementation

Microservice Transition and its Granularity Problem: A Systematic Mapping Study

Microservices have gained wide recognition and acceptance in software industries as an emerging architectural style for autonomic, scalable, and more reliable computing. The transition to microservices has been highly motivated by the need for better alignment of technical design decisions with improving value potentials of architectures. Despite microservices' popularity, research still lacks disciplined understanding of transition and consensus on the principles and activities underlying "micro-ing" architectures. In this paper, we report on a systematic mapping study that consolidates various views, approaches and activities that commonly assist in the transition to microservices. The study aims to provide a better understanding of the transition; it also contributes a working definition of the transition and technical activities underlying it. We term the transition and technical activities leading to microservice architectures as microservitization. We then shed light on a fundamental problem of microservitization: microservice granularity and reasoning about its adaptation as first-class entities. This study reviews state-of-the-art and -practice related to reasoning about microservice granularity; it reviews modelling approaches, aspects considered, guidelines and processes used to reason about microservice granularity. This study identifies opportunities for future research and development related to reasoning about microservice granularity.Comment: 36 pages including references, 6 figures, and 3 table

SOA Governance – Road into Maturity

There is a general consensus that SOA benefits could be reached but it is unclear how to achieve this. Research shows that the problems with SOA governance in practice are among the major reasons of SOA failures. Based on a literature review, this study first proposes a list of SOA aspects to be considered when implementing SOA governance. By adopting an interpretive research methodology based on interviews, this research paper makes two contributions: it addresses the practical matters that are major concerns for organisations to achieve a higher maturity level with their SOA, and it reveals the importance of the key SOA aspects in building strong governance and consequently reaching a higher maturity level. The expected result should deliver a theoretical contribution to SOA maturity in relation to SOA governance; it could provide organisations with new awareness in assessing their level of maturity and provide recommendations

The Role of Service Oriented Architecture as an enabler for Enterprise Architecture.

Organisations are being challenged to ensure that IT delivers on business requirements, but more importantly to ensure that IT can provide greater differentiation and competitive advantage in the context of business, as opposed to the traditional supporting role that many IT professionals have become accustomed to. There needs to be a drastic change in the relationship between IT and business, in order to address the challenges that organisations are currently experiencing and will be experiencing in the future. This change can only be achieved when IT can demonstrate real business value to organisations. SOA, EA and the relationship between them provide a means to achieve the relationship between IT and business by providing a means of defining and implementing business capabilities. This research focused on investigating the guidelines that are needed for SOA to enable EA, in order to provide practical steps that organisations can use for the alignment of SOA and EA

Aligning a Service Provisioning Model of a Service-Oriented System with the ITIL v.3 Life Cycle

Bringing together the ICT and the business layer of a service-oriented system (SoS) remains a great challenge. Few papers tackle the management of SoS from the business and organizational point of view. One solution is to use the well-known ITIL v.3 framework. The latter enables to transform the organization into a service-oriented organizational which focuses on the value provided to the service customers. In this paper, we align the steps of the service provisioning model with the ITIL v.3 processes. The alignment proposed should help organizations and IT teams to integrate their ICT layer, represented by the SoS, and their business layer, represented by ITIL v.3. One main advantage of this combined use of ITIL and a SoS is the full service orientation of the company.Comment: This document is the technical work of a conference paper submitted to the International Conference on Exploring Service Science 1.5 (IESS 2015

Towards alignment of architectural domains in security policy specifications

Large organizations need to align the security architecture across three different domains: access control, network layout and physical infrastructure. Security policy specification formalisms are usually dedicated to only one or two of these domains. Consequently, more than one policy has to be maintained, leading to alignment problems. Approaches from the area of model-driven security enable creating graphical models that span all three domains, but these models do not scale well in real-world scenarios with hundreds of applications and thousands of user roles. In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of aligning all three domains in a single enforceable security policy expressed in a Prolog-based formalism by using the Law Governed Interaction (LGI) framework. Our approach alleviates the limitations of policy formalisms that are domain-specific while helping to reach scalability by automatic enforcement provided by LGI