The impact of service oriented architecture adoption on organizations

Abstract

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is one of the technologies in the area of information systems’ design and architecture in the recent technology world. SOA adoption is known as an evolutionary process, instead of revolutionary one. In this process an application is developed in a long period of time which will be improved gradually. Since there is a limited number of researches that focus on the effects of SOA adoption in an organization, this study investigated the significant factors which affected SOA and have been more discussible in the last five years based on previous studies such as governance, strategy, complexity, Return on Investment (ROI), business and IT alignment, culture and communication, costs, and security. Since most of the researches focus on qualitative analysis for SOA adoption, a need for empirical research was felt. So, this study conducted a quantitative analysis to investigate the influential factors for adopting SOA. In addition, an SOA adoption framework was proposed to measure the effect of factors on SOA adoption and the performance of organizations. Based on the proposed framework, an online questionnaire was created and distributed among SOA experts through LinkedIn (the largest social networking website for people in professional occupations) to collect data about the influence of SOA adoption on organizations. Subsequently, this study has made recommendations for improving the organizations planning to adopt SOA or in the way of adopting SOA to promote the performance of their organizations. On the other hand, the outcomes of this study may pave the way to form the basic knowledge in the domain of organizational and technological SOA adoption and trigger further research in the field.