Service Oriented Architecture: Challenges for Business and Academia

Today, the means for attaining competitive advantage with information technology (IT) has shifted from efficiently managing the organization's operations to discovering ways to collaborate with industry partners to provide products and services to markets that are otherwise uneconomical to pursue. Current IT challenges center on ways to integrate diverse systems into function rich business processes that span organizational boundaries. Though service oriented architecture (SOA) is poised to become a mainstream technology, its success may hinge on a meeting of the minds between the architects and developers of Web services and business process modelers who map out corporate requirements. This paper defines SOA, discusses how SOA relates to business process management, and provides an illustration of enterprise SOA applied in an enterprise resource planning (ERP) environment. The paper also describes how SOA motivates change in IT governance, enumerates the fundamentals of SOA success, and reflects on implications for IT education.