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

ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks: a literature review

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is a complex and vibrant process, one that involves a combination of technological and organizational interactions. Often an ERP implementation project is the single largest IT project that an organization has ever launched and requires a mutual fit of system and organization. Also the concept of an ERP implementation supporting business processes across many different departments is not a generic, rigid and uniform concept and depends on variety of factors. As a result, the issues addressing the ERP implementation process have been one of the major concerns in industry. Therefore ERP implementation receives attention from practitioners and scholars and both, business as well as academic literature is abundant and not always very conclusive or coherent. However, research on ERP systems so far has been mainly focused on diffusion, use and impact issues. Less attention has been given to the methods used during the configuration and the implementation of ERP systems, even though they are commonly used in practice, they still remain largely unexplored and undocumented in Information Systems research. So, the academic relevance of this research is the contribution to the existing body of scientific knowledge. An annotated brief literature review is done in order to evaluate the current state of the existing academic literature. The purpose is to present a systematic overview of relevant ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks as a desire for achieving a better taxonomy of ERP implementation methodologies. This paper is useful to researchers who are interested in ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Results will serve as an input for a classification of the existing ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Also, this paper aims also at the professional ERP community involved in the process of ERP implementation by promoting a better understanding of ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks, its variety and history

Service Oriented Architecture Adoption: A Systematic Review

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has appeared as an absorbing architectural approach that empowers the available systems to reveal their performance in the act of services without creating important changes to the systems. This approach, due to its flexibility of adoption, has been widely appreciated by the businesses. Though there are many studies that depict successful factors of SOA, a few minor cases of failure have also been reported in the literature. In spite of the availability of rich material on SOA, there is no systematic literature review on the influential aspect of SOA adoption factors. Thus, this paper presents a systematic literature review of existing studies (from 2009 to 2015) related to the SOA adoption and its success and failure. The central purpose of the study is to focus on the existing issues and share the findings with researchers. Moreover, the findings of this paper would help the IT experts in organizations focus on the most important factors highlighted in this study, so they could decide whether it is advisable to adopt SOA in their context or not

A PROPOSITION OF CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS INFLUENCING SOA IMPLEMENTATION IN HEALTHCARE

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been proved to be a significant integration paradigm in many sectors including healthcare. The importance of the development of integrated Information Technology (IT) services and infrastructures in healthcare is enormous as medical errors that occur due the non integrated nature of healthcare systems result in the loss of human lives. The normative literature demonstrates that organizations have difficulties in getting full benefits from SOA adoption for various reasons. Thus, we suggest that the investigation of Critical Success Factors (CSFs) related to SOA implementations in healthcare is important as the understanding of these factors may help organizations to increase the benefits they get from SOA and improve SOA acceptance rate. As a result we review the literature to identify SOA CSFs in healthcare and we classify them. Then we test them through a case study in a public healthcare organization. The results stress the crucial importance of governance and culture and proposed that a new CSF called ?Communications? should be considered. In doing so, we extend the body of literature and we suggest that further research is required to better understand SOA CSFs in healthcare

Service-oriented architecture as a driver of service innovation in newly emerging service systems: An exploratory view

Innovation in services can be regarded as an inter-play of service concepts, service delivery practices, client interfaces, and service delivery technologies. Furthermore, innovations in services are increasingly brought to the market by networks of firms, selected for their unique capabilities and operated in a coordinated manner, referred to as a service system or service value network (SVN). Bringing such service innovations to market by a network of firms requires extensive coordination and integration of data, information/knowledge and processes, while ensuring strategic alignment of partnering firms. In this research we examine how Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and its effect on Information Technology Infrastructure Flexibility (ITIF), may act as a potential enabler for recently identified organizational drivers of services innovation in a service system, namely Collaborative Architecture Management (CAM) and Collaborative Organizational Infrastructure (COI). A preliminary qualitative study of a Telco and its partners in the Middle East validates the dynamic capabilities at play in our proposed research model

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

How can Service-Oriented Architecture drive service innovation in newly emerging service systems?

Innovation in services can be regarded as an inter-play of service concepts, service delivery practices, client interfaces, and service delivery technologies. Furthermore, innovations in services are increasingly brought to the market by networks of firms, selected for their unique capabilities and operated in a coordinated manner, referred to as a service system or service value network (SVN). Bringing such service innovations to market by a network of firms requires extensive coordination and integration of data, information/knowledge and processes, while ensuring strategic alignment of partnering firms. In this research we examine how Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and its effect on Information Technology Infrastructure Flexibility (ITIF), acts as an enabler for recently identified organizational drivers of services innovation in a service system, namely Collaborative Architecture Management (CAM) and Collaborative Organizational Infrastructure (COI). © 2011 AICIT