An analysis on the impact of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) adoption in organizations

Abstract

An enormous number of organizations world-wide have adopted SOA. However, there are still only a limited number of research studies focusing on both the effects of SOA adoption in an organization, in addition to the factors an organization requires to adopt this technology. Hence, this study has investigated significant factors which affect SOA and these are discussed throughout the paper. From an examination of studies from 2009 till 2013, we noticed a number of important factors that impact on SOA adoption. Since most of the researches focus on qualitative analysis for SOA adoption, this study conducted a quantitative analysis to investigate the influential factors leading to the adoption of SOA. In order to conduct the research, an online questionnaire was created and distributed among SOA experts through the social networking platform of professionals, LinkedIn. Total one hundred and four (104) respondents from thirty (30) countries participated in this study. The results of this study indicate that there are both positive and negative influences upon SOA adoption. The positive influences includes, namely: governance, strategy, culture and communication, business and IT alignment, as well as ROI; while complexity, security concerns, and costs have negatively affected SOA adoption.