Companies have long sought to integrate existing Information Systems
(IS) in order to support existing and potentially new business processes
spread throughout their "territories" and possibly to collaborating
organizations. A variety of designs can be used to this end, ranging
from rigid point-to-point electronic data interchange (EDI) interactions
to "Web auctions". By updating older technologies, such as
"Internet-enabling" EDI-based systems, companies can make their IT
systems available to internal or external customers; but the resulting
systems have not proven to be flexible enough to meet business demands.
A more flexible, standardized architecture is required to better support
the connection of various applications and the sharing of data.
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is one such architecture. It unifies
("orchestrates") business processes by structuring large applications as
an ad-hoc collection of smaller modules called "Services". These
applications can be used by different groups of people both inside and
outside the company, and new applications built from a mix of services
(located in a global repository) exhibit greater agility and uniformity.
Thus, SOA is a design framework for realizing rapid and low-cost system
development and improving total system quality. SOA uses the Web
Services standards and technologies and is rapidly becoming a standard
approach for enterprise information systems integration.
SOA adoption by enterprises has been identified as one of the highest
business priorities by a recent Gartner study (Gartner 2007) and
enterprises increasingly recognize the requirement for an increased
"Service-orientation" and relevant comprehensive frameworks, which will
not only help them position themselves and evaluate their SOA
initiatives, but also guide them in achieving higher levels of SOA
maturity. This in turn, will help enterprises acquire (and retain)
competitive advantage over other players in the market who are not
(using SOA and thus they are not) so flexibly adjusting themselves to
address new business requirements.
This book proposes a new SOA Maturity Model (MM) using a Delphi-variant
technique and this constitutes one of its distinguishing features
because none of the relevant existing works utilized Delphi. Moreover,
the fact that the proposed SOA MM supports inter-enterprise setups makes
it even more distinct.
The newly proposed SOA MM is then used to help the participating
organizations position themselves in respect to SOA (current status),
guide them to achieve higher levels of SOA maturity, and anticipate
their SOA maturity in five years' time.
Furthermore, the "local" or "global" nature of the proposed SOA MM is
investigated. This is checked firstly against selected expert panel
participants and secondly against local business practitioners.
