THE (LACKING) BUSINESS PERSPECTIVE ON SOA – CRITICAL THEMES IN SOA RESEARCH

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has gained much popularity lately, in both practice and academia. Since SOA concepts and technology are maturing, companies have started to engage in projects that will fundamentally transform IS landscapes over the next decade. While the growing body of SOA research is mostly technology-oriented, the IS community needs to investigate the strategic, organizational, and managerial issues associated with SOA implementation. This paper profiles SOA and Web services research since 2000 with a focus on practices, adoption, and impact. Drawing on a sample of 175 papers in academic journals and conference proceedings, we establish transparency of the current state of research. Our analysis finds that the science base for SOA research from an IS perspective is still under construction thereby reflecting the novelty of the underlying technologies. We conclude that business aspects remain underserved and derive a number of recommendations for the IS community on how to proceed with SOA research

Investigating Adoption Determinants of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA)

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) gain an increasing focus in the academic literature as well as in practice. According to Forrester Research at least 63% of the North-American, European and Asian-Pacific enterprises have adopted SOA by the end of 2008 (Heffner 2008). However, there is still a lack of a coherent picture of why firms adopt SOA. As Vitharana et al. point out future research should investigate organizational and industry characteristics that influence adoption of the service paradigm (2007). Thus, the aim of this research is to investigate different proposed drivers of SOA adoption, such as technological advantages such as reduced costs due to modularity and reuse, business advantages such as increased business flexibility, or environmental determinants, such as management fashion

Assessment of SOA Potentials in B2B Networks – Concept and Application to German Used Car Distribution Networks

Although service-oriented architecture (SOA) is supposed to increase external integration capabilities, it is mostly applied within company boundaries. How companies should apply SOA to improve their inter-organizational relationships is not, as yet, well understood. Although there are several examples of service-oriented concepts in the B2B context, there has been little research in which the different facets of SOA application are analyzed in inter-organizational relationships and B2B networks. This research aims at filling this gap. First, it identifies SOA potentials from literature and classifies them into a conceptual model for B2B networks. Second, it applies the conceptual model to used car distribution as a real-world scenario. This real-world example demonstrates that a SOA business case is highly situational and that key SOA capabilities need to be mapped to the specific industry context

EXPLAINING THE ROLE OF SERVICE-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE FOR CYBER-PHYSICAL SYSTEMS BY ESTABLISHING LOGICAL LINKS

In the context of the so-called fourth industrial revolution, cyber-physical systems (CPS) build the technological foundation for the increasing digitalisation of our world. Because guidelines to overcome challenges of building such systems (e.g. security concerns, missing know-how, and lack of standards) are scarce, researchers and practitioners alike have begun to analyse the role of the mature paradigm of service-oriented architecture (SOA) in implementing CPS. However, the relationship between SOA and CPS is not entirely understood. To close this gap, we analyse SOA’s role for CPS based on a concept-driven literature review. The analysis of 12 publications that address the interrelation between SOA and CPS yielded four groups of CPS benefits that can be achieved by leveraging SOA. Combining these benefits with architectural layers and SOA’s design principles, we identify logical links that explain the role of SOA for CPS. Future research might concentrate on dominant patterns to scrutinise how a specific benefit can be achieved by leveraging SOA. Designers of CPS can leverage the identified patterns to understand the importance of specific characteristics of SOA to address the unique requirements of their CPS

Service-oriented Architecture Projects in Practice: A Study of a Shared Document Service Implementation

Published version of an article in the journal: Procedia Technology. Also available on Science Direct: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.protcy.2014.10.017This paper reports on a case study focusing on service-oriented architecture (SOA) projects in practice. The aim of these projects has been to develop a shared document service supporting different business divisions in a large Norwegian governmental institution. The research question guiding this research is: How are SOA projects carried out in practice? What are the challenges of developing shared services in service-oriented architecture? SOA projects are accompanied by a complex socio-technical system development environment. In the present study we followed parallel system development processes and identified several issues associated with competence requirements, distributed coordination principles and control, lack of communication, tuning of parallel projects, and selection of appropriate project management approaches and system development methods. Clearly, there was a difference between undertaking a system development project within one organizational unit (silo) compared to the development of shared services to provide support across a large organization. Findings demonstrate that the complexity of SOA projects was underestimated by the project managers, and ad hoc governance was practiced in terms of control, coordination, and communication. To capture the entire system development context of an SOA project, a holistic approach and mind-set comprising time management and fine tuning of all parallel SD activities is necessary. Organizational maturity to carry out SOA projects is also of significance. The study has implications for SOA adopters in general and for system developers and project managers working in an SOA context in particular

Embarking service-oriented architecture into student information systems

Most organizations have more than one information system (IS) for their data and activity management. In Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM), the Computer Centre is responsible for various IS related to students.However, none of these systems are fully interoperable in heterogeneous IS because they are using different types of database and programming language. This causes difficulties to automatically integrate data in the heterogeneous IS.As a result, the person in charge at each IS needs to do manual selections to get data from other IS. Consequently, the same tasks will be repeated since they have to enter and re enter similar data into different IS.In addition, this situation is increased the operation and maintenance cost, and waste the data storage space caused by the redundancy of data. Even though UUM has an IS that uses an integration tool for updating required data from the main student IS, it is still unable to update concurrent data on real-time and it needs one tool installed for each two IS to be integrated.This study aims to propose a conceptual model of the heterogeneous IS integration based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) concept.A case study approach was applied involving student IS in UUM because IS in a university are large, distributed and quite difficult to involve the whole IS with very limited time and cost.In validating the proposed conceptual model, this study uses experimental of prototyping and experts review. With the finding and result of this study, it is expected to produce a valid conceptual model of student IS based on SOA concept.Further, the model could serve as a guideline to related organizations in adopting SOA concept in improving the management of their IS integration

Rollenbasiertes SOA-Governance Dashboard

Mit dem zunehmenden Einzug von serviceorientierten Architekturen (SOA) in Unternehmen wächst auch der Bedarf an leistungsfähigen Werkzeugen zur Unterstützung der SOA-Governance. Diese sind notwendig, um zu den technischen Umsetzungen auch strategische, organisatorische und personelle Änderungen einzuführen. Ein immer wichtig werdender Bestandteil solcher Werkzeuge ist das Dashboard. Es soll für verschiedene Zielgruppen, wie zum Beispiel Manager, Entwickler oder Administratoren, die wichtigsten Informationen zusammenfassen und übersichtlich darstellen. In dieser Arbeit wird ein solches Dashboard entworfen und entwickelt. Dafür wird zunächst eine umfangreiche Literaturanalyse anhand von akademischen Quellen, sowie Veröffentlichungen von Softwareherstellern, Beratungsfirmen und unabhängigen Autoren durchgeführt, in der sowohl Stakeholder als auch Kennzahlen der SOA-Governance ermittelt werden. Darauf aufbauend wird zudem ein allgemeines Rollenmodell entwickelt. Zusammenfassend werden dann die identifizierten Kennzahlen den einzelnen Rollen zugeordnet, um eine zielgruppengerechte Darstellung dieser Kennzahlen ermöglichen zu können. Auf dieser Basis wird dann ein detailliertes Konzept für ein SOA-Governance Dashboard entworfen. Dazu werden mögliche Darstellungsmöglichkeiten für Kennzahlen untersucht und ein Rechte-Management für diese entwickelt, welches gewährleisten soll, dass die Kennzahlen ausschließlich den Stakeholdern angezeigt werden, deren Rolle dies erlaubt. Um abschließend deutlich zu machen, wie eine Umsetzung des Konzepts unter Berücksichtigung der Anforderungen an eine zielgruppengerechte Darstellung der identifizierten Informationen aussehen kann und welchen Nutzen ein solches SOA-Governance Dashboard hat, wird das Konzept prototypisch implementiert und evaluiert

On the usage of theories in the field of Wirtschaftsinformatik : a quantitative literature analysis

The development of theories is a central goal of every scientific discipline. Hence, theory development is also of considerable importance to the field of Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI), which seeks to progress as a scientific discipline. WI is the discipline focussing on research and design of information systems conducted by the German-speaking community. WI has slightly different objectives, focusses on different methods and different desired results compared to the Anglo-American Information Systems (IS) research discipline. Although both disciplines deal with information systems as their main research object, Mertens et al. (2014) propose to consider both disciplines as halfsister disciplines (in German: Halbschwesterdisziplinen). Against the background of the growing importance of theory development in WI, a lot of WI research contributions use and reference existing theories and theoretical models for different purposes, e.g. to derive and test hypotheses or to justify design decisions in the context of information systems’ design and development. Often, these theories originate from related scientific disciplines like economics or psychology. However, as it is still not clear which theories are of particular importance to WI research, this report aims at presenting a detailed analysis of the current usage of theories in WI and addresses the following research questions: Which theories are used in WI research and where do they originate from? and How has the usage of theories developed over time? These questions were examined based on a systematic analysis of a broad amount of scientific literature. Thus, this report is supposed to make a contribution to the ongoing discussion on the theoretical foundations of WI. Our analysis shows that 1,160 WI articles from 2000 to 2011 do, in large part, reference the same theories as Anglo-American Information Systems (IS) research. These findings are discussed and implications are highlighted

Factors affecting adoption of service -oriented architecture (SOA) at an enterprise level

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 104-112).Service-oriented computing is an emerging IT innovation. Among its manifestations is service-oriented architecture (SOA), an approach to designing and implementing IT solutions. Organizations adopting SOA are facing implementation challenges. Examining factors affecting SOA adoption at an organizational level can reduce uncertainty about SOA, its advantages and disadvantages, and implementation issues. This study uses quantitative analysis to investigate organizational SOA adoption in South Africa from DOI theory and TOE framework perspectives. Results highlight a number of factors influencing SOA adoption: use of multiple standards and platforms, complexity, compatibility, cost, top management support, good governance and strategy, adequate human and financial resources, vendor support for integration and development tools