Abstract
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.
Keywords
service oriented architecture, SOA, enterprise architecture repository, Web services
About the authors
Bruce McCabe is the Managing Director of S2 Intelligence Pty Ltd, a company he founded to research technology issues for Australian enterprises. Since 1995 he has provided research, analysis, and advice to Australia’s top 200 corporations and to agencies in every State and Federal government. He is a prolific IT industry commentator and contributor to public debate on technology issues. He writes a weekly column in ‘The Australian’ newspaper.
Dr. Robert Kay is the Head of Strategic Innovation at Westpac Banking Corporation where he is responsible for the development of a strategic capability based upon the use of techniques from systems and complexity theory. Before returning to industry he spent several years as an academic undertaking research projects in the areas of IT/business strategic alignment, complexity theory, systems theory, and organizational development. He has taught at a number of Australian universities as well as in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
References
Bednarz, A., and Fontana, J. (2004) “Early adopters: SOA worth the effort,” Network World, Volume 21 Issue 45, p. 12.
Bradbury, D. (2004). “Service-oriented architectures will deliver eventually, but don’t hold your breath.” Computer Weekly, 30 March 2004, p. 20.
Brown, G. and Carpenter, R. (2004). “Successful Application of Service-Oriented Architecture Across the Enterprise and Beyond.” Intel Technology Journal, Volume 8 Issue 4, p. 345.
Fontana, J. (2004). “Service-oriented hype to meet hard realities,” Network World, Volume 21 Issue 44, p. 1.
Gasc, C. (2004). “UK’s e-gov initiatives put SOAs to the test,” Computer Weekly, 20 July 2004, p. 20.
Henschen, D. (2005). “New Rules, Agile Government,” Intelligent Enterprise, Volume 8 Issue 1, p. 43.
Imhoff, C. (2004). “What’s An Architecture, Anyway?,” DM Review, December 2004, Volume 14 Issue 12, p. 38.
Johnson, J. T. (2004). “Making sense of service-oriented architectures,” Network World. Volume 21 Issue 43, p. 30.
Kobielus, J. (2004). “SOA and the death of platforms,” Network World, September 6 2004: p. 41. Available online at http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2004/ 090604kobielus.html
Mohamed, A. (2004). “Service-oriented architecture will help IT make business more agile,” Computer Weekly. 11 February 2004, p. 14.
Papazoglou, M. (2003). “Service-Oriented Computing: Concepts, Characteristics and Directions,” IEEE, Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering, (WISE’03) July 2003, pp. 3-12.
Perrey, R. and Lycett, M. (2003). “Service- Oriented Architecture”. IEEE, Proceedings of the 2003 Symposium on Applications and the Internet Workshops (SAINT’03 Workshops), January 2003, pp. 116-119.
Saran, C. (2004). “Web services come of age with development of service-oriented architecture’s black box,” Computer Weekly, 23 March 2004, p. 8.
Schwartz, E. (2004). “Is SOA Customer- Driven?” InfoWorld, Volume 26 Issue 32, p. 10.
Journal of Enterprise Architecture