Impact of SOA Adoption with regard to Business Value

Abstract: In today’s rapid changing environment organisations are required to quickly adapt to the new market conditions. As a result, organisations strive to be flexible and be agile in order to cope with these conditions. Moreover, the introduction of new technologies and information systems has increased the number of middleware in IT architectures, which are considered monolithic and inflexible. SOA is an emerging architectural style that attempts to solve these problems. The concept of SOA is a relatively new concept and there is currently an increase interest in SOA, both from academic researchers and industry practitioners. It is being argued that SOA has many different interpretations which can be regarded as ambiguity and confusion. Moreover, there is little knowledge on SOA adoption and the impact of SOA adoption in an organisation. As a result this study will answer the following research question: what is the impact of SOA adoption? In order to answer the research question, this study will first explain some concepts related to SOA and present an overview of SOA adoption by conducting a literature review. The literature review results in a research framework and it is use thereafter to conduct an empirical study. Empirical data has been collected from two sources: SOA adoption project documentation and interviews with different key persons from a Large South East Asia Bank. Our preliminary findings suggest that from a business value perspective, SOA impact an organisation from two dimensions: business agility and costs. Business agility factors include: system integration, alignment between IT and business goals, response to market changes & customer demands, data flow, and customer services; while cost factors comprises: application development cost and time, reuse of existing applications and operation costs. Other factors identified during the empirical study were: increase human-resource productivity as well as increase in application reliability. This study concludes by proposing a model as a basis for future SOA adoption studies.