Challenges of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) - From the public sector perspective

Abstract: The Swedish government started its initiative for electronic services (e-services) in 2005 to create the infrastructure for information management, optimize the government, and potentially save tax money. The technological paradigm Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) was adopted to facilitate the Swedish government's initiative. The purpose of SOA is to increase efficiency for developing e-services. Nonetheless, several challenges remain with SOA implementations and there is little research exploring the challenges faced by the public sector specifically. This thesis aims to highlight the challenges faced by the public sector when implementing SOA. The authors conducted a semi-structured interview study involving four IT Architects working closely with SOA development. Moreover, the authors reviewed the literature to identify the SOA challenges and to create a theoretical framework to support the validity of the empirical findings. Results & Conclusion The empirical findings reveal 13 challenges met by the public sector. They are real-time communication, service cooperation, testing, reliability, security, legacy software migration, legacy migration cost estimation, SOA governance, vendor software customization, Organizational change, slow IT adoption, lack of strategy, and SOA owners. The most commonly reported challenge is SOA governance. This challenge is associated with the lack of technological understanding by the management, as well as with the caution about adopting new technologies. Three of the identified challenges were not found in the literature review. They were slow IT adoption, lack of strategy, and difficulties in finding SOA owners.