Service Oriented Architectures: The State of Play in Australia
The notion of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) has received considerable attention in the commercial literature over the past two years, but a consistent definition of what an SOA really is, and what it does, has yet to emerge, and almost no empirical research has been conducted to find out what SOAs means to the IT practitioners charged with implementing them in businesses and government organizations. This study attempts to address this gap by reporting on the results a qualitative research study conducted to ascertain what service-oriented architectures meant in practice to the IT practitioners working on them in 23 large Australian organizations. The findings are then used to draw some conclusions on how SOAs can be expected to evolve in the organizations in the future.