Service Oriented Architecture: SOA Adoption

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has the potential to simplify business-to-business integration by making it much easier for partners with different systems to communicate with one another (Tibco, 2011). SOA is a design philosophy based on the concept of services and focuses on the greater alignment between enterprise business and IT (Choi and Ramamurthy, 2011). SOA is independent of any vendor, product, technology or industry trend. Enterprise’s interest in SOA remains very significant, the principles of service orientation such as reuse, loose coupling, and service discovery are more important than ever due to the emergence of the digital world. The scope of SOA adoption can vary, and the enterprise has to keep its efforts manageable and

A maturity framework provides guidelines through the evolutionary process of organizational development (Mettler et al., 2010). SOA adoption itself is a process and that can be assessed and improved using an SOA maturity framework. The different levels or stages of SOA adoption can be represented by SOA maturity framework and a maturity framework describes what is required to realize the value of a service-oriented approach at each level. We defined a hypothesis that the SOA maturity framework can be used to engineer methods for the SOA realization. We formulated this hypothesis because SOA adoption has mainly two stages: an IT-driven stage and a business-driven stage; SOA maturity framework provides what needs to be done to move from an IT-driven stage to business-driven stage. Different levels of maturity can represent this transformation path from one stage to another. In fact, the methods to be implemented at each level have its own specific motivation. Maturity frameworks are the best candidates to start the requirement gathering for the ME process as they consider different stages of adoption and describes what is required to realize the value of a service-oriented approach at each level. We believe that a reengineering approach based on feature analysis of existing SOSE methods helps to select the right method fragment that conforms to the maturity

(2008) proposed a concrete method and rules for engineering a true SOA. They considered the aspects of SOA such as modeling business services, designing domains, designing components, and designing interfaces. This work is not directly contributing to the discipline of ME and can be considered as another SOSE method focused on enterprise IT architecture; the methods are engineered based on the SOA framework specifically TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework). The approach being followed is an instantiation of SOA framework and tries to differentiate various aspects of both business and IT.

A study by Garro et al. (2010), proposed an approach for new method definition to address specific issues of service-oriented applications by reusing existing method fragments and experimented with a CASE tool. In this work, the authors applied the composition of existing method fragments, that covers the complete service lifecycle, from service requirement specification till service based system testing. In general, this study focuses on enterprise SOA adoption by considering different service lifecycle activities and ignores different stages of enterprise SOA